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Amazon, Apple and Google Cut Off Parler

• bebopcowboy 6y ago
  “Just make your own app store!”
• afavour 6y ago
  Still accessible via the web, of course (and from what I understand Parler is a PWA that can be installed to the homescreen).
  • isitdopamine 6y ago
    Until their hosting decides to block them, or my ISP, or several AS’s in the middle decide to block them and there’s no route to them. The answers, respectively, would be: start your own hosting provider, start your own ISP, deploy your own Internet. Just to be clear: I’ve never used Parler.
• ve55 6y ago
  It must feel pretty surreal to be someone that is constantly moving to different communication apps and instantly finding them pulled by anyone and everyone. We've seen an escalation of this from higher-level platforms (obviously Twitter can ban an account if they desire) to medium-level platforms (I suppose Apple gets to pick what I can do on my own phone even if it feels a bit wrong), but I'm curious if this will also escalate to low-level platforms (will hosting companies, registrars, or even ISPs start taking similar actions on a regular basis?). At this point it appears to be in a bit of a feedback loop as well, since it's obvious that deplatforming groups will make them feel persecuted and even more upset, which then makes them more likely to be deplatformed by whichever platform they move to next. Could this escalate even past low-level companies and result in decentralized, uncensorable, and end-to-end encrypted technologies having action taken against them (as more users, including some that are radicalized, seek them out)? I certainly hope not, but I have no faith in our government's various administrations here to begin with, especially given that we are likely only at the beginning of these types of conflicts. (Obligatory note that I am not defending any given platform, group of people, or anything of that matter, as I find it much more interesting to talk about how systems like this may play out instead)
  • cryptoz 6y ago
    It seems to be that these platforms were quite outrageously accepting any content at all being published on their platforms, including direct personal threats and incitements to violence. If these groups want to not be deplatformed every few years, they ought to moderate the content. That seems to be all Apple is asking for here - just moderate out the illegal content and you can come back. That only seems hard to do for conservative groups - everyone else seems to at least try to moderate, even if they do it unevenly or not quickly enough, they try. These deplatformed companies and actors don't ever seem to even try to moderate. I don't feel bad for them, personally.
    • ghgdynb1 6y ago
      I understand your sentiment, but the thing to realize is that the point you’re responding to is about decentralization and whether this will be an accelerant for the transition to a more distributed tech ecosystem. It’s not about how anyone feels about the parties involved in any particular case.
      • cryptoz 6y ago
        I don't agree that there is the feedback loop that exists in the OP's post. Deplatforming is not some inescapable negative feedback loop that these people can't get out of. It is the result of criminal behavior. If the criminal behavior stops, the deplatforming stops. We already have processes in our society to reduce and hopefully eliminate criminal actors.
  • tmpz22 6y ago
    > Could this escalate even past low-level companies and result in decentralized, uncensorable, and end-to-end encrypted technologies having action taken against them? Americans drop a loser like a brick. Taking Parler off the app stores seriously de-legitimizes their cause and their celebrity. If you read Apple's language [1] its very clear Apple believes Parler is operating in extremely bad faith, that they either lack the ability to moderate or are only doing so as a temporary token gesture. This means Parler's user demographic will become more and more full of fringe radical elements that scare off the silent majority less radical crowd. [1]: "Your response also references a moderation plan “for the time being,” which does not meet the ongoing requirements in Guideline 1.2 – Safety – User Generated content"
• dabbledash 6y ago
  10 years from now: “I never thought a leopard would eat MY face!”
• diebeforei485 6y ago
  It was never a fair expectation that Parler would be able to scale up moderation in 24 hours. So this was in effect a rigged deadline, somewhat analogous to a "Performance Improvement Plan".
  • insert_coin 6y ago
    Apple has been trying to get them to implement moderation for months, they just gave them the 24 hours as an ultimatum after not getting anywhere with them and the real world situation escalating.
    • diebeforei485 6y ago
      [citation needed]
  • cryptoz 6y ago
    Sure it was a fair expectation, because that expectation was known before Parler even started up coding any apps. That's always been the rule. No hate speech, no illegal content, no direct threats of violence. Hardly an unfair expecation for Parler to meet those guidelines - the 24h notice seems to just be a kind gesture that wasn't really even necessary from Apple's part.
  • wnevets 6y ago
    Parler and its issues have existed for a lot longer than 24 hours. This isn't the first time they been told, this is just the first time its resulted in the lost of life.
  • happytoexplain 6y ago
    An impossible deadline in other contexts can of course be designed to be impossible for petty reasons, but when the object in question is a runaway train, you can't really wait to pull the plug. You can only give them as long as possible, and must prioritize safety.
  • beaugunderson 6y ago
    > It was never a fair expectation that Parler would be able to scale up moderation in 24 hours. Apple asked for a plan, not for an implementation. From Apple's letter: > In addition [to removing the death threat examples in the letter], you must respond to this message with detailed information about how you intend to moderate and filter this content from your app, and what you will do to improve moderation and content filtering your service for this kind of objectionable content going forward.
• Helloworldboy 6y ago
  Thats okay, they can just build their own network, hosting, payment processor, and app store. Totally not censorship.
  • paintstripper 6y ago
    I'm all for censorship when it's hate and lies.
    • Acrobatic_Road 6y ago
      Great. Let's start with CNN and NYT.
• jedberg 6y ago
  I'm not a huge fan of Parler, but hopefully this move pushes the government to force Apple to allow alternate App stores and/or side loading. People should be able to run Parler on their phone if they want to, with full API access, not the half-measures that having a web app allow.
  • tomrod 6y ago
    > People should be able to run Parler on their phone if they want to, with full API access, not the half-measures that having a web app allow. Under what justification? These people agreed to the contract. Their BATNA is Android, which allows sideloading, or their web browser, where they can be as unmoderated as they want to be. There is no problem here. If you want an Iphone supporting app store with more permissible side loading, go build one.
    • diebeforei485 6y ago
      No, their BATNA is lobbying the antitrust subcommittee.
      • tomrod 6y ago
        Which one?
        • diebeforei485 6y ago
          It's largely been the House side that has taken the lead so far, but a new Democratic Senate would also be interested in regulating Apple's "services" including the App Store. They can easily get enough Republicans onboard to stop a fillibuster. After the Parler situation, Republicans would no longer feel the need to defend Apple's App Store margins (regardless of whether or not Parler can come back under the proposed laws, the political damage is done).
          • tomrod 6y ago
            That's not a best alternative to the negotiated agreement. They should just sideload android or develop their own "Freedom Phone."
• ascales 6y ago
  The only way they would've made this deadline would've been to delete all of their posts. I'm not upset in the slightest about them being gone, but I can kind of see the argument about how the app store is deciding how someone uses their phones here.
  • tmpz22 6y ago
    I disagree. Apple's response quotes Parler's language and suggests they are operating in bad faith and any moderation effort in the last 24 hours was a token gesture at best.
  • Triv888 6y ago
    Is it really your phone? You can't even be root.
• option 6y ago
  this will further isolate the part of population which need to hear alternative viewpoints the most.
  • wjp3 6y ago
    Yes - I'm sure Parler was where they heard these alternative viewpoints they so needed to hear...
  • joshuamorton 6y ago
    Parler already banned non-right wing content (contrary to its "free speech" claims). If you wanted to de-escalate on parler, you couldn't. You'd get banned.
    • cma 6y ago
      Source on that?
      • joshuamorton 6y ago
        https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200627/23551144803/as-predicted-parler-is-banning-users-it-doesnt-like.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200627/23551144803/as-pr... https://happymag.tv/parler-free-speech-social-media-banning-users/ https://happymag.tv/parler-free-speech-social-media-banning-... tl;dr a bunch of liberal and leftist people joined Parler back in June when it got popular. They did so intentionally to test how "free-speech" supporting it was and if it would allow people to post left-wing content. They got banned.
        • cma 6y ago
          The first article says: " And, yes, some people are claiming that Parler's quick trigger finger is mostly about shutting down "left" leaning accounts, but as with Twitter's content moderation, I won't say that for sure unless I see some actual evidence to support it." And the second seems to be a rehash of the first. Most of the substance seems to be based on twitter claims with no verification?
• sefrost 6y ago
  What happens if someone already has the app installed? Is it removed from their device? If not will it still be able to receive updates?
  • nlh 6y ago
    Will not be removed from devices. If you have it, it stays on your phone. But no updates either.
• mcphilip 6y ago
  Glad I downloaded it yesterday since this was obviously an unrealistic deadline. It’s getting harder and harder to keep tabs on both sides now. Things have really fragmented in the past 24 hours: lots of posts on MeWe, Telegram, Gab, etc, looking for the “best” communication channel.
  • tomrod 6y ago
    Won't it always be IRC through anonymous VPN and TOR?
    • mcphilip 6y ago
      I’m not saying it will be impossible to access, just harder for Average Joe who doesn’t understand App Store versus WWW. It’s fascinating, if somewhat terrifying, watching communication channels breakdown for millions of people.
      • tomrod 6y ago
        It's not terrifying at all. It's is breaking apart proto-terrorist cells, if the posts on /r/ParlerWatch can be believed. Which is something both the left and the right in the US support, at least until recently.
  • mmastrac 6y ago
    If you want to see all the calls for violence, they are streaming minute by minute on the donald site. Some even worse things today (I had to stop reading it because it's getting to the point of super illegal).
    • randyrand 6y ago
      donald site?
      • dwaltrip 6y ago
        Probably referring to thedonald.win. Warning: It's a total shit show on there. I believe it was created after the subreddit r/thedonald was banned from reddit.
• xiaolingxiao 6y ago
  Is there someone closer to the decision making process who could explain this sequence of events? From afar it looks as if all the tech companies coordinated this action, Apple delaying it by a day for optic reasons. I am not as troubled by the decision as some people, but the timing merits examination.
  • cryptoz 6y ago
    The tech companies did not coordinate the attempted violent overthrow of the US government; that was the far-right extremists doing the coordinating, not the tech companies. The tech companies are simply responding to their platforms being used to incite violent riots, murder, and the direct overthrow of our democratic government.
• NotChina 6y ago
  This seems very counter to the whole Net Neutrality movement. If my ISP starts blocking Tor, or charging extra to get to YouTube.
  • bebopcowboy 6y ago
    Nobody here cares about net neutrality or censorship because they all receive biweekly checks from their big tech employers
  • IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago
    No, it has absolutely nothing to do with Net Neutrality. Which you know by describing things that do somewhat resemble issues of NN, but which have nothing to do with the topic at hand.
• jpxw 6y ago
  Regardless of your political persuasion, you should be concerned about this. Massive multinational corporations having this much power over our speech is not healthy. If they can do this to a sitting President of the US, they can do it to every single one of us.
  • babelfish 6y ago
    Apple, and any other multinational corporation, is under no obligation to host inflammatory hate speech seeking to incite an insurrection against the US Govt.
    • konjin 6y ago
      So why haven't they banned twitter for hosting Chinese government accounts?
      • babelfish 6y ago
        Can you link me to a Chinese government official’s Twitter account calling for an insurrection in the United States while spewing derogatory hate speech against minorities?
    • jpxw 6y ago
      If I had a dollar for every time someone made this point... The issue isn’t whether they have the right to deplatform. The issue is whether they _should_.
      • babelfish 6y ago
        Of course they should. Why shouldn’t they remove platforms that almost solely contain hate speech and insurrectionist content? Half the stuff said on Parler could constitute a hate crime, and frankly, they should have been removed from the App Store/Play Store ages ago.
        • klmadfejno 6y ago
• beebmam 6y ago
  The only actual alternative is if people start investing in open cellular platforms. I fully support the right of companies to sell locked down hardware, we shouldn't be trying to over-regulate here. The right response to this situation is to compete with it using open hardware, which respects its users. It's insane to me that we have all tolerated companies dictating what kind of software we run on the hardware we buy from them. It's time to fight back. Open Mobile Hardware now!
  • reducesuffering 6y ago
    Already exists https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/ https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/
    • octoberfranklin 6y ago
      Authorized by zero carriers in the USA. Sorry man, I got burned when Verizon nuked all the EC25 devices. That's not a gamble I want to take with an $800 phone. I support their mission but without carrier authorization you're one whim away from having an expensive brick in your pocket. It sucks but that's the cell phone market. Note how purism goes to extreme lengths to dodge the question of "which networks will your phone work on". They have these elaborate frequency tables but never name any networks, then at the bottom the fine print admitting that they have no carrier authorizations.
• brink 6y ago
  So.. embrace censorship or get de-platformed. Got it. I don't use Parler, but this newfound love of censorship is going to end badly. How long until we start book burning because they promoted wrongthink?
  • Acrobatic_Road 6y ago
    https://thefederalist.com/2020/11/13/target-swiftly-bans-book-on-behalf-of-anonymous-twitter-user-crying-transphobia/ https://thefederalist.com/2020/11/13/target-swiftly-bans-boo... but I should add they later reversed the decision
  • pldr2244 6y ago
    Libraries already don’t publicly store especially extremist material. This isn’t really different, only the medium/technology is.
  • robertoandred 6y ago
    You think Apple should allow people to promote and plan violence on their platform? Really?
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
• bjt2n3904 6y ago
  It's very surreal watching this happen. CloudFlare will be next, and they've already set the precedent that they will cease to serve websites that are "detrimental to society". Followed by Digital Ocean, Amazon, Verizon, Comcast, AT&T. For those of you who championed XKCD #1357 at every opportunity, congratulations! You've won. For a short time. The consequences of censorship will be dire. I'm no fan of Sagan, but he was right what he saw here: > I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; [...]
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • bhawks 6y ago
    I often see the meme that modern technology has made free speech too dangerous. I wonder how has modern technology made censorship safer?
  • louwrentius 6y ago
    It's funny to me. Big words about censorship and dire consequences, but I see it as a sane correction of the current wild-west that is untenable. Finally, some big players kick off bad-faith actors from their platforms. People that call for violence and hate. There is no need for a platform in this world where you can use racial slurs, call for hate and violence.
  • throwawaysea 6y ago
    Wow that Sagan quote is prescient. Where is that from? And yes it is deeply concerning that an infrastructure service like Cloudflare is becoming increasingly political. This is what happens when companies stop acting neutrally and allow themselves to be influenced by activist employees or outside social/political pressure. The precedent they set will probably extend to all the other infrastructure players. And this is why it is more crucial now than ever for us to enforce antitrust laws and split up and/or regulate powerful companies. They are acting government agencies simply shielded from the same responsibilities because they are technically private.
• joebidenforprez 6y ago
  This is ridiculous. Who decides what is considered violence and what is not? I personally feel black lives matter was a terrorist organization, they looted stores, destroyed people livelihood, murdered whites in the streets, and destroyed many cities across america. Yet posts calling for those protests are fully allowed, even encouraged on mainstream platforms like twitter etc. Yet a small group of crazies march on the rich politicians like pelosi profiting off all the dumb people who voted for them, eating 10000$ ice cream and going to hair salons while everyone is locked down and that is called violence!! Why should apple be the one to decide what is violent and what isn't. This is crazy.
• de6u99er 6y ago
  Since Trump announced to create his own social media platform after all the bans, does anyone think he will announce now his own smartphone and mobile OS?
  • ceejayoz 6y ago
    Right after he finishes that healthcare plan that's been coming "in two weeks" for several years now.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• systematical 6y ago
  Can Parler still be installed from a direct download or is this at the O.S. level?
  • United857 6y ago
    For iOS, theoretically possible via re-signing a IPA and sideloading via a paid iOS developer account. Otherwise iOS won't run unsigned code without a jailbreak.
    • systematical 6y ago
      Android?
    • e1ghtSpace 6y ago
      You got an .ipa? Cannot find one anywhere.
• admiralspoo 6y ago
  There are already calls in congress for similar measures against OANN, Newsmax and Fox News and also calls for action by lower-level providers such as AWS. It doesn't take much thought to see the US is going for the next few years.
• headgasket 6y ago
  « The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism » Do not search for it. Do not mention it or allude to it
• djakaitis 6y ago
  It’s hilarious to see all these alt right folks clamor about free speech. Always thought they were big defenders of free markets and corporate friendly policy.
  • Acrobatic_Road 6y ago
    these corporations may as well be the government
• WatchDog 6y ago
  If parler defined their API in an open format, that anyone could implement, could a generic client app be allowed on the app store?
  • DenisM 6y ago
    Not in my experience, no. I have a training YouTube video in my app and Apple rejected it because YouTube inserted their video recommendations after my training video was done, and one of those recommendations was a disturbing news footage. You would have to reengineer your system along the lines of IRC where the app is divorced from the content.
    • WatchDog 6y ago
      Right so, when you open the app, you must choose a server to connect to, for the purposes of app verification, you provide a server with heavy moderation. I could see apple having issue with providing pre-filled server selection, but if you had to manually enter a domain, I would be interested in how they would move the goal posts to deny an app like that.
      • DenisM 6y ago
        Something like that might work. Their goal so far has been avoiding casual exposure to anything less than family-friendly. If a user has to go out of their way to procure offensive content it seems Apple is not that concerned - browsers, mail clients, IRC clients, etc is fine.
      • Anon1096 6y ago
        I think a good example here is Telegram. Telegram did not used to surface NSFW chats on iOS to comply with the App Store. But you could still join the channels manually. However, on a whim Apple decided that wasn't enough and now you cannot access those at all on iOS, you get a message saying it's blocked. Of course, it wouldn't be able if they were committed to equal treatment, so the counterexample here are the many Reddit apps on iOS. You can join NSFW subreddits and they are allowed so long as they aren't shown by default. The only explanation is here Reddit is used by Apple employees or they know there would be an outcry if the rules were evenly applied.
• adrr 6y ago
  I heard they are about to get banned from AWS. Rumor is that Amazon has also demanded full moderation. I know they are getting pressure from Amazon employees and AWS customers.
  • DenisM 6y ago
    Link? That would be a major development.
    • adrr 6y ago
      Twitter rumors. Here’s an article from a google news. Edit it’s now official: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/johnpaczkowski/amazon-parler-aws https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/johnpaczkowski/amazon-p...
• mmastrac 6y ago
  Anyone who thinks this is a line too far really needs to start reading these sites before they get deplatformed. There are constant, intense calls for violence (in Minecraft), photoshopped porn of Hunter Biden and just a regular stream of dog whistles and keywords that cannot be interpreted any other way. There is no loss here. The right has collectively lost its mind and these sites are pure sewer. On top of this, the sites are ironically so anti-left that you are banned instantly if you even tried to discuss something in good faith. It'd be hilarious if it wasn't so terrible.
  • incrudible 6y ago
    > The right has collectively lost its mind and these sites are pure sewer. Until now, only the most extreme positions were forced into "the sewer". Expelling Trump from Twitter will force him and tens of millions of his followers onto one of these platforms. The sewer is going to overflow.
• ctdonath 6y ago
  Problem is: what constitutes acceptable moderation? Much of the “cancelling” going on now is strained deliberate misinterpretation of intentions/statements of opponents, a power play for a political purge. Problem is: how to specify what moderation is acceptable for Apple et al, without making it abundantly clear how biased/bigoted/unfair the demands are?
  • Pfhreak 6y ago
    > Much of the “cancelling” going on now is strained deliberate misinterpretation of intentions/statements of opponents, a power play for a political purge. Citation needed. Alternatively, did you forget to add "in my opinion" somewhere in that sentence?
• frEdmbx 6y ago
  Everything we're witnessing is a result of the slavers prepping for the collapse of the world reserve fiat global enslavement system, and their attempts to maintain dominion throughout. The permissionless, decentralized, alternatives, aren't part of the same freefall as all the perpetually inflated fiat currencies, and are problem for them. https://fiatmarketcap.com/ https://fiatmarketcap.com/ They must convince us to accept the violations of speech, press, privacy, property, and arms, in order to deal with cryptocurrencies. If we're able to communicate, we're able to use cryptocurrencies. This is why we're being inundated with endless pretenses.. so that we'll be cowards willing to exchange essential liberties for the illusion of security.
  • user-the-name 6y ago
    This is gibberish.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
• dredmorbius 6y ago
  Also covered by MacRumors: https://www.macrumors.com/2021/01/09/apple-suspends-parler-from-app-store/ https://www.macrumors.com/2021/01/09/apple-suspends-parler-f...
• jelliclesfarm 6y ago
  2021 would be better, they said. things can only look up after 2020, they said... it's starting to feel like someone is tightening the screws on the tech companies. that is, if one wants to provide a charitable explanation for their decisions this past year. it's pretty surreal to see tech sector's lockstep march.
  • DenisM 6y ago
    A wild guess. Globalized economy benefits the entire tech sector plus some parts of non-tech. It also hurts a number of businesses and a huge number of American workers. Trump is an anti-globalist, hence why he gets pummeled.
    • IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago
      Or, maybe, it was the whole “trying to overturn an election” thing?
• jonhohle 6y ago
  I’m glad that private businesses have the ability and confidence to restrict government speech on their platforms. What I find concerning, however, is a large group of companies which are direct competitors of each other are acting unilaterally to the ban same users on platforms completely unrelated.
  • sigotirandolas 6y ago
    I mean, given the current situation, which company wouldn’t do something so that if another event as bad or worse as the Capitol storming happens, they can say “look, we did all we could! It didn’t happen due to our platform!”
• throwawaysea 6y ago
  I am really disappointed that it has come to this. In a short few days we have normalized: 1. Twitter picking political winners and losers, where they ban some accounts like Trump but allow others (like the Chinese or Iranian government, like BLM associated rioters, etc.) to post whatever they want. 2. Collusion between different tech companies all adopting the same policy in lock step, with no real choice (no real market competition) for customers as a result since all of them are making identical political choices. 3. Censorship and deplatforming moving down the stack into the operating systems of phones. Let's be honest, Apple's 24 hours was a meaningless gesture that affords Parler no time. As always, an incident like this is used by those with power to normalize exercising even more power. It happened after 9/11 and it is happening again here now. Glenn Greenwald has a great article on this recent capitol riot (HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25702575 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25702575) and it highlights the parallels between our reaction to this incident today and the reactions seen post-9/11. Personally, I think the trend towards discarding free speech principles in favor of heavy censorship will keep continuing. I will not be surprised if Apple and Google start censoring what websites and IP addresses you can access. The answer can't just be "go build your own competitor" when one side with political and technical power is going to keep deplatforming you at lower and lower levels of the stack. It is not feasible for someone to build their own phone or operating system, and even the Android co-founder (!) tried exactly this (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essential_Phone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essential_Phone) For there to be choice, the biggest tech companies must be split up. And those whose service depends on network effects must be regulated when their network is above a certain size, because they can be as influential a power broker as a government. Twitter and Facebook (and others) are examples of this, and they can't just be treated like just any other private company. These days I feel like speech in the public sphere only exists if it exists on one of these platforms that are in wide use. We need to regulate them so that they are required to carry all speech that does not explicitly break the law.
  • louwrentius 6y ago
    1. An Iranian remark about unsafe vaccines was pulled (so not true) 2. If you don't use racial slurs, call for hate or violence, there is no problem for anybody. 3. This is not about censorship in the sense that the government forbids you to speak. This is companies denying 'you' access to a megaphone if you use it to call for violence, hate and use racial slurs. The idea of 'heavy censorship' is ludicrous to me. Nobody is being censored. You can still say what you want, but nobody has to listen to you. And if you don't use racial slurs, call for hate and violence, you are totally free to use the platforms.
• optimalsolver 6y ago
  /pol/ pasta: imagine spending the better part of the last 5 years having your brain and ego melted by uninterrupted /pol/ exposure, flying to washington in the middle of a pandemic to hear trump whine about oprah and mike pence at a rally, marching up to congress on his orders to smash shit and then mill around aimlessly you go home and hear that biden won anyway and all of your favorite twitter news sources named like Patriot Newsman Of the West with avatars of roman statues have posted your photo online and are labeling you a "gay communist antifa actor." then the next day the god emperor you pasted into warhammer memes puts out a video cucking himself and bending the knee. "i'm sorry, those were heinous acts! p-please let me tweet again jack!!" you can't leave dc because the airlines have dubbed you a flight risk. you can't stay because the cops are actively looking for you after one of their own died. your roommate at the only hotel that would accept you is a guy named based_kekistani1488 who wants to show you his goblin slayer torrents. the sun is going down and you're getting cold.
• frEdmbx 6y ago
  We should understand that all of this so called "censoring" is happening in/on private property, and not actually censoring. The owners of property have every right to set the conditions of use, if any, for any. If Trump, et al, want to pretend that these private properties are actually essential, and the owners of them don't have the right to set whatever conditions, perhaps they should nationalize them, and auction them off to an acceptable group of sole US citizen bidders who agree to whatever standard. ...or the US could go back to respect property rights, despite it supposedly being out of fashion these days.
  • base698 6y ago
    I'm sure John Stuart Mill will be scraped from the internet soon but it's still worthy of protection: > 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.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• drummer 6y ago
  Big tech is doing everyone a favor right now with this censorship. It will get us faster to decentralized alternatives. > John Gilmore, one of the founders of the EFF, once famously wrote, "The ‘net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."
• mudil 6y ago
  How did antifa continued to get organized in the last 5 years? Did they have a purge of accounts? Any apps got banned from app stores?
  • ceejayoz 6y ago
    If you're asking how antifa gets organized, you've got some fundamental misunderstandings about antifa.
• user-the-name 6y ago
  At what exact point, I wonder, will Hacker News stop complaining about slippery slopes and freedom of speech, and actually consider the possibility that they might lose a whole lot more than the ability to run an app? That they might, reasonably, lose the privilege of living in a functioning democracy? That maybe there are more pressing concerns than what apps they can run on their phones? More pressing concerns than the ability to act like an asshole online? That maybe it's time to take the threat of the far right seriously?
  • lolpoliticsonhn 6y ago
    While I personally disagree with any and all censorship, the real question here is who is allowed to decide the rules? Even if we were all to agree that a specific ideology or narrative could be dangerous there is an issue with putting a central entity in a position of control. As we have seen, rules are applied arbitrarily and even when there are defined rules, platforms continue to make any type of decision they want.
    • user-the-name 6y ago
      Is that REALLY a bigger problem than a murderous crowd trying to overthrow democracy, egged on by the president?
  • sharatvir 6y ago
    It’s telling when people are more scared about some people being banned from a an online forum than they are about an insurrection and death threats toward the Vice President and members of Congress.
• United857 6y ago
  At the time of its removal Parler already rose to the #1 spot. Will this move by Apple and Google backfire due to the Streisand Effect?
• perryizgr8 6y ago
  No worries guys, they can just develop their own os! With their own app store! And when hosting companies ban them they can just write a new ip version and host it on their own internet. Seriously, apple, Google, Twitter, Facebook are monopolies. And they are behaving in an extremely anticompetitive manner. They should be forced to operate like utilities, or get broken up. Utilities should not get to ban paying customers without a court order.
• nostromo 6y ago
  Political affiliation needs to become a protected class. If your business is open to the public, you can’t deny people service for being gay or black (which is a great thing) - you also shouldn’t be able to deny them service based on their politics.
  • sharatvir 6y ago
    Why should white supremacy and neo nazism be a protected class in the same vein as ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation?
    • axaxs 6y ago
      Corporations with the ability to freely serve, or fire, people for wrongthink has the inevitable outcome of people only parroting what their employer tells them to. Support our cause or be expelled. It's happening slowly, but expect it to ramp up in coming years. Is that a world you want to live in? All in the name of those damn nazis again.
    • Vomzor 6y ago
      Because the definition of nazi or white supremacist widens every day. What is acceptable today is racist next week.
      • courtf 6y ago
        I'd be more than willing to overlook their degeneracy if they would stop trying to shove their lifestyle down our throats.
      • dang 6y ago
        It looks like you've been using HN primarily for political battle, or at least getting uncomfortably close to it. That's not allowed here—it destroys the curious conversation that this site is supposed to exist for. When accounts cross that line (see https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0&query=primarily%20test%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme... for more explanation), that's when we start banning them, regardless of which politics or ideology they're banning for. I'm not going to ban you right now because as of a few months ago (say, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23644508 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23644508 and further back) your account mostly wasn't abusing HN this badly though you were still doing it (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23609087 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23609087 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23495773 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23495773). Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and go back to using the site for its intended purpose, and please don't post any more flamebait.
• wnevets 6y ago
  I can't wait for ISPs to start censoring the type of content that you would find on Parler, not because I think they should or that it is a good thing but because of the schadenfreude. Republicans fought hard to kill network neutrality and having their faces eaten by its removal in such a short time would be worth it.
• deleted 6y ago
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• gulag4nerds 6y ago
  Siri, how do I radicalize people who already think the cabal is out to get them further?
• mimikatz 6y ago
  Allow Verizon and ATT to turn off the rebels phones, and we need ISP level filtering to stop the insurrections from communicating.
• wrs 6y ago
  Hey free speech absolutists: Given the venue, I’m guessing some of you work with distributed systems, right? What’s happening now is called a “circuit breaker”. When you have an emergency in progress and your system is melting down, you pull the plug and let the fire go out while you figure out what the heck is happening. We had nearly absolute free speech on the internet and we got a delusional psycho mob organizing to invade the Capitol to avenge nonexistent election-stealing. So we know that doesn’t work. Let’s put the Capitol and the government back together and figure out what does.
  • bpodgursky 6y ago
    Do you legitimately think the patronizing is effective, or do you just do it to feel good?
    • wGeF7H8Z59y985y 6y ago
      Why don’t you boys go outside and sort yourselves out there? Please don’t disrespect the establishment.
• twoheadedboy 6y ago
  in before removed even though it's incredibly relevant
  • s17n 6y ago
    But unlikely to lead to a worthwhile conversation.
• tonyztan 6y ago
  Dup: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25706993 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25706993
  • WatchDog 6y ago
    Unsurprisingly it seems that submission has been flagged off the front page, ironic, in the Alanis Morissette sense.
    • throwaway122378 6y ago
      Welcome to the United States of China
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
• sjg007 6y ago
  I mean they can use safari to access the web app. Might be harder to get push notifications but...
• musicale 6y ago
  I can understand why Apple might act to protect their business or to avoid liability. The App Store is clearly a curated platform, so Apple could potentially be held liable for harmful apps that it publishes. Moreover they are within their rights to drop any app that they don't wish to publish, or that they claim violates their terms of service – just as Nintendo can drop a game from the eShop. It could backfire somewhat if they become viewed as unfairly censoring political opinions.
• deleted 6y ago
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• deleted 6y ago
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• cbradford 6y ago
  Endless quests to crush marginalized people does not work in the long run and is exhausting. Although large tech companies are filled with hate and rage now, efforts to silence those who have little voice takes ongoing effort.
• bubmiw 6y ago
  It was number 1 app for 48 hours, post Trump big tech is biggest threat to the world. wall street pales in comparison, china too.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• DC1350 6y ago
  If they don’t like it they should create their own government.
• spondyl 6y ago
  An interesting excerpt from a recent Fox News interview with Parler's Chief Policy Officer[1]: Just watching a Fox News interview with the Parler Chief Policy Officer and she said "People seem to want [tech companies] to 'moderate' as they call it, content on these platforms but that would require 24/7 surveillance and I don't think that is consistent with the principles of America" For context, she seemed quite non-technical but I thought it was an interesting insight into how systems with good intentions can be miscontrued (willingly or accidentally). The chyron ironically says "Parler: We will not surveil innocent people" at one point. I guess you'd need to rely on user reports to claim that but you're definitely going to end up with false reports for sure. On a side note, how could Parler ever operate if Trump pulled Section 230? Wouldn't they instantly be considered culpable (as would every other company) for their users content? It seems like a lose-lose threat. [1]: https://youtube.com/watch?v=MNIxatQ0fKU https://youtube.com/watch?v=MNIxatQ0fKU
• whatsmyusername 6y ago
  The real dunk will be if AWS acts. They’ve acted before against Gab properties.
  • benbristow 6y ago
    They already have - https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/johnpaczkowski/amazon-parler-aws https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/johnpaczkowski/amazon-p...
    • whatsmyusername 6y ago
      Yep, I just saw that. If the CEO had kept his trap shut they had a chance. He elected to bleet publicly.
• cp9 6y ago
  Don’t foment violent insurrection against the us government next time, I guess
• barnaclejive 6y ago
  good
• bishnu 6y ago
  I find no fault with the social network bans, and I don't even mind the Google Play Store ban (given the ability to sideload apps, including alternate app stores, on Android), but totally banning an app from an OS like this does give me pause.
• ipnon 6y ago
  There was an essay in N+1 years ago called Googlebang, the thesis being that the proliferation of pornography on the Web was in no small part due to the sexual liberty proliferate in the San Francisco Bay Area that continues to this day. That was the seed that the abundant network effects spread far and wide. I think we can attribute the same source to the phenomenon of reactionary politics being relegated to the Dark Web. It's not that social media companies silence right-wingers per se: right-wingers don't found social media companies.
• mjfl 6y ago
  I've read comments saying, "if you don't like Apple's policies, build a new smartphone." Are these people aware that that the same type of argument lead to the creation of parler: "if you don't like twitter censorship, build a new platform". It will be built. What then? At this point we are heading towards a complete mitosis of our information channels based on political ideology.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • yanderekko 6y ago
    >It will be built. I don't think we're going to get a "red" phone. Seems more likely that we'll just see people get Parler on Android through channels other than the Play Store. >What then? There's a lot of additional attack vectors. We've already seen Amazon move to boot Parler off its web infrastructure. If that fails to kill the platform, we'll likely see attacks on anything related to its financing, or things like CloudFlare protection. If that fails I could see progressives abandoning net neutrality to lean on ISPs to block traffic. In reality I don't think we'll get all the way there, but we'll get close enough that a stable "red social media" ecosystem will emerge that's out of reach of cancellation. In the long run this may work out worse for everyone.
    • alfl 6y ago
      Gab announced a phone today.
      • blisterpeanuts 6y ago
        That's interesting news. Do you have a link?
        • alfl 6y ago
          Yes! Looks droidlike. [0]: https://news.gab.com/2021/01/09/gabs-statement-on-apple-and-googles-tyranny/ https://news.gab.com/2021/01/09/gabs-statement-on-apple-and-...
• b0bb1z3r0 6y ago
  No law says Apple has to allow side loading afaik. Twitter isn’t mandatory. You choose to install it and create an account and tweet. Seems like a bunch of Trumpers hijacked this thread to argue in favor of punishing “someone” because Trump got booted. Apple isn’t obligated to “distribute” Parler via their App Store. Just because you can’t come into “my house” and scream your bs, doesn’t mean you’re being censored. How about that?
• llboston 6y ago
  I used to feel pretty strongly about the CCP banning Twitter, Facebook and Google. Not any more.
• bedhead 6y ago
  All roads lead back to about half a dozen companies. The concentration of power is astonishing and terrifying. They have all of the US, maybe even the world, checkmated. Nothing good will come from this.
  • dannyw 6y ago
    But they don’t have China.
    • wppick 6y ago
      China has them
      • ivnubinas 6y ago
        Touché
  • heimidal 6y ago
    This comment makes it sound like AWS controls web hosting for the entire planet. There are literally thousands of web hosting options; Parler can go find a different one.
    • read_if_gay_ 6y ago
      Then you can't get the news out because Google blocks you from search, nobody can tweet about your site, you can't find it on the app stores, Facebook won't let you put ads, and/or Cloudflare won't give you DDoS protection, so I guess you just make your own parallel universe?
      • heimidal 6y ago
        None of the examples you've cited are the only option. Can't use Google, Facebook, or Twitter? Advertise on TV, buy billboards, or hand out flyers on the corner. Can't use CloudFlare? Buy another solution or spend millions to build one yourself -- CloudFlare is, by no means, the sole provider of such services. The minute you force a company to do business with people they don't want to do business with is the minute you've nationalized the business. So that's the solution -- if the US government so strongly believes that these resources are vital to society in the way that, say, the electric grid is, they need to turn them into regulated utilities. Until then, they are profit-seeking companies who believe they are protecting their shareholders by choosing to refuse service to a customer.
• meekmockmook 6y ago
  Every single player in this saga deserves nothing but contempt. Trump is reprehensible and his supporters are brainwashed. Big Tech conglomerates now openly disenfranchise and deplatform millions of people simultaneously through a coordinated effort. The implications for the future of speech and dissent are terrifying. Just disgusting and depressing in every way. An internet utopianist's nightmare. I don't want to live in the United States of Trump. I don't want to live in the United States of Dorsey, Bezos, Zuckerberg, and Pichai. The only way out is through sweeping antitrust enforcement against the entire tech industry.
  • darig 6y ago
    Awwww... can't little mookie get himself a gay wedding cake anymore? Sad.
  • asiando 6y ago
    I was ok with Facebook doing it, I'm not ok with a hosting kicking a paying customer out like this.
    • linuxftw 6y ago
      Hosting companies have been doing this long before the app store or twitter existed. You just didn't hear about it.
    • loopz 6y ago
      This is what "cloud" means.
      • chevman 6y ago
        Easy come, easy go!
      • canofbars 6y ago
        Problem is there is no alternative. You can't just run your own server because your ISP can still cut you off.
• cheeze 6y ago
  Regardless of my/your thoughts on Parler, godspeed to those engineers. Assuming a majority of Parler infra is hosted on AWS, and it wasn't built to be multi-cloud, moving hosting providers in ~36 hours seems like a herculean task.
  • ashtonkem 6y ago
    They knew what they signed up for. Maybe they didn't know that a coup would end up planned on their app in the public, but it was nakedly obvious to everyone that Parler was going to go the route of Gab or Voat. Those who didn't jump ship a long time ago decided that that wasn't a problem for them. Their bigger issue is going to be the fact that their resumes will be radioactive going forward. Reputation harm is actually a real thing; if Uber engineers struggled to get new jobs after all those bombshells years ago, these people's careers are probably de-facto over.
    • petermcneeley 6y ago
      Reminds me of that clerks episode: https://youtu.be/iQdDRrcAOjA?t=79 https://youtu.be/iQdDRrcAOjA?t=79
      • cableshaft 6y ago
        Was expecting to see a clip of Dante and Randal climbing up the building of Leonardo Leonardo. Your clip makes more sense.
    • logicchains 6y ago
      >these people's careers are probably de-facto over. You make a very bold assumption that none of the ~75 million Trump voters in the US are in tech hiring positions.
  • pizazzz23 6y ago
    Aren't they all 10X programmers now that Trump gutted the various visa programs? Come on you lot! We stopped the immigrants so you should all have you CS PhDs now, right?
• danhak 6y ago
  The same folks who think you can't force a bakery to bake a gay cake want to force Apple to distribute an app or Twitter to publish anyone's nonsense. You can't have it both ways. For the self-proclaimed free-marketers, how is this different? It's about scale. We have an antitrust issue, not a free speech issue.
  • orange_joe 6y ago
    I think you're right about antitrust. Apple prevents side loading so this goes beyond them deciding not to distribute. So even if parler wanted to self distribute it can't (for iPhones at least).
    • madeofpalk 6y ago
      They can't distribute a native app. They can continue to operate on Apple devices as a website or a PWA (whatever "PWA" means). Is the distinction between these two important?
      • dannyw 6y ago
        Yes. PWA != app.
        • madeofpalk 6y ago
          Forums existed before iPhone or the App Store.
          • dannyw 6y ago
            Yeah, but the web has less reach than the web + native apps. A judge isn’t going to (seriously) consider PWAs if Microsoft sued Apple for not allowing xCloud on iOS.
            • madeofpalk 6y ago
              Right so its less about the technical merits of apps vs websites and more about whether Apple should have to promote them or not.
• cp9 6y ago
  hell yeah. no #hugops from me. don’t market yourself as a haven for nazis if you don’t want people to hate you and kick you out
• admiralspoo 6y ago
  It likely doesn't stop with Parler. Fox News, OANN and Newsmax also have targets on their backs placed by the incoming regime.
  • de6u99er 6y ago
    I hope tech companies will also do a purge amongst their employees.
    • imwillofficial 6y ago
      Wow. Disgusting.
      • mynameishere 6y ago
        Companies already fire people for ideological differences. Brendan Eich is the obvious example. The reason you don't get "purges" (ie, mass firings) is because people know just how likely they are. You shut your mouth during the "diversity" struggle sessions and similar rubbish. You keep your campaign contributions to 200 dollars or less. You sure as hell don't associate political speech to your PID. You are mindful of cross pollination between databases. This is how we live now.
        • imwillofficial 6y ago
          This is true, and it breaks my heart. I have so much love for this country and those in it. The fact the certain people’s views are being censored with the full power of the state + private companies is just sad.
    • one2know 6y ago
      They have been for years. Ever heard of diversity hiring. Diversity = anti-white = leftist. Overwelming majority of whites and white males vote republican and support trump. That is what diversity hiring has been all about.
• ENOTTY 6y ago
  Reading Amazon's reasoning, tech companies are basically setting a standard that if you want to have user-generated content, you must have professional moderators. This seems like it will be a barrier to innovation.
  • marstall 6y ago
    so was the FDA?
  • omgwtfbyobbq 6y ago
    What was their reasoning? I only saw this. Amazon declined to comment on the suspension.
    • ceejayoz 6y ago
      AWS's reasoning is included in the article; a direct copy of their email to Parler is quoted. > Recently, we’ve seen a steady increase in this violent content on your website, all of which violates our terms. 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. This is further demonstrated by the fact that you still have not taken down much of the content that we’ve sent you. Given the unfortunate events that transpired this past week in Washington, D.C., there is serious risk that this type of content will further incite violence.
      • omgwtfbyobbq 6y ago
        Thank you. It does seem like Amazon requires professional moderation when someone's service is used to incite violence. I wonder if this is in part due to concerns about revising section 230.
• baggy_trough 6y ago
  Risible.
• jimbob45 6y ago
  This is smart from a strategic standpoint. Parler is highly likely to be where the next terrorist announces their crime and there will never be a more volatile time this year for that to happen (fingers crossed). Amazon gets to dodge that bad PR nearly for free. It’s garbage from a civil rights standpoint though lol
  • NDizzle 6y ago
    Nah, terrorists announce shit on Twitter.
• logicslave 6y ago
  People on the left are mistaken if they think this is going to help. Someone somewhere in the country will plot something. We are playing with fire with these type of restrictions, root causes are not being solved. 75 million people voted for Donald Trump.
  • lumpenprole 6y ago
    Everything but appeasement with these people is "playing with fire". 82 million people are tired of it.
    • pupdogg 6y ago
      With only a slight difference...if there is an all out war, 75 million people show up only to counter 6. My opinion is strictly based on the turnouts I’ve seen at their rallies.
    • casefields 6y ago
      Vs 74 million that have a disproportionate amount of weaponry. A disproportionate amount of law enforcement. A disproportionate amount of the military. I'd take that group to win any day. You've got the suburbs and inner city's. Controlling big tech, big media, education institutions, aren't going to help in this scenario. Oh and lot a degrees. Death by paper cuts maybe?
      • lumpenprole 6y ago
        The plural of city is cities.
      • conception 6y ago
        And money. You forgot that part.
        • lumpenprole 6y ago
          Good point. Someone has to pay for their disability benefits.
• PragmaticPulp 6y ago
  Discussions are naturally taking this move to hypothetical extremes, but Apple's stance doesn't seem very inconsistent with previous actions. They're not demanding that Parler moderate anything and everything on their platform, but they aren't ready to allow a completely unmoderated platform that features blatant calls to violence and suggestions to execute public officials. For what it's worth, it appears to be working. Parler is starting to remove the most egregious calls to violence, such as Lin Wood's famous call to prepare firing squads to use against the Vice President of the United States: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/parler-reportedly-removed-posts-trump-232421829.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/parler-reportedly-removed-pos...
  • madeofpalk 6y ago
    Apple's stance is very consistent with their history of inconsistent action. Where Apple sees a problem, they act.
• it 6y ago
  The left’s ideas can’t win in an open marketplace. So this is what they do instead.
• throwarayes 6y ago
  > “[W]e cannot provide services to a customer that is unable to effectively identify and remove content that encourages or incites violence against others,” This seems to be the standard
  • killjoywashere 6y ago
    They probably owe a modifier to violence. I mean, plenty of government agencies involved in national security use AWS.
    • adolph 6y ago
      Probably have a different TOS by customer type and governing legal auth. It’d be interesting to boil away the broiler plate and see the differences between them.
    • yew 6y ago
      Government agencies are, if not precisely incapable of sedition, at least going to have trouble engaging in it.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • dcolkitt 6y ago
    Question: Would this mean that Signal's backend would be prohibited from running on AWS? After all, it's almost assuredly the case that at least some Signal users are actively plotting violence. Yet end-to-end encryption by definition makes it impossible for Signal to identify that content.
    • lostcolony 6y ago
      "Almost assuredly" is different than "obvious and blatantly and not being moderated". Obviously. You're making the same argument the government has made against encryption. Moderating a private conversation is obviously different than moderating a public one.
• DJPocari 6y ago
  Where do we draw the line on how we censor the internet? Obviously actual terrorist group sites can and should be taken down, but this feels like it's getting more murky than that. - Should we be okay with Facebook censoring these groups? - Should we be okay with Google censoring search results? - Should we be okay with Apple censoring apps? - Should we be okay with AWS censoring websites? - Should we be okay with GoDaddy censoring domains? - Should we be okay with Verizon censoring internet traffic? Giant corporations aren’t simply following court orders, they are acting on their own now. This is problematic for a multitude of reasons. The precedent has been established. * EDIT: By "actual terrorist groups" I mean those that are classified as such by the US Government (e.g. FBI, CIA, NSA). While I think QAnon and Proud Boys have many of the characteristics of a terrorist group, they are not classified as such (personally I think they should be, but it's the government's job to decide that). *
  • tptacek 6y ago
    It's a good question, but for the record, I'm fine with the line being somewhere before Parler, which is full of people plotting political assassinations. This happened to Gab.ai, too, but it happened after one of those plotters committed a mass murder, one he advertised on Gab, at the Tree of Life synagogue.
    • canofbars 6y ago
      Yep I think its fine that parler is getting booted based on the content that is getting posted. Lets not pretend that all these companies are trying to squash people of a certain political group, they are simply banning users posting borderline illegal and violent content. You can quite easily use mainstream social media as long as you aren't posting about how someone should be beheaded.
      • 1MachineElf 6y ago
        >You can quite easily use mainstream social media as long as you aren't posting about how someone should be beheaded. Is that so? Curious, because I was seeing a lot of guillotine memes from leftists last month.
• micksabox 6y ago
  This proves the multi-cloud advocates were right! If Parler used Kubernetes, they could migrate more quickly. /joke
• dcploy99 6y ago
  This is a good use case I have been explaining my customers. Be ready to for a swift “de loud” action.
• suyash 6y ago
  Oracle should scoop them up, lot of AWS customers have moved to OCI which is also cheaper in cost.
  • one2know 6y ago
    I'm sure they are going through the same calculus. Leftists at all tech companies have been stacking their management with left authoritarian sympathizers for years, most from overseas. However, LPOD is probably heavily right leaning, so who knows what faction they will be on. (LPOD = larry ellison, prince of darkness)
    • amanaplanacanal 6y ago
      Possibly. He probably doesn't want calls for violence on his platform either, though.
      • one2know 6y ago
        What about calls for imprisoning people? That off limits? Because there are thousands and thousands of posts out there on leftists boards where leftists with delusions of grandeur are talking about who they are going to imprison on the right. That constitutes violence.
        • amanaplanacanal 6y ago
          Since imprisoning people requires a trial by jury, and guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, it isn’t something that random people on the internet can take into their own hands. This certainly seems like much less of a problem.
• npunt 6y ago
  The short term calculus seems pretty clear: if a service is unable to moderate conversations that are inciting and planning imminent violence that undermines the fabric of democratic society (aka inauguration or the disruption of the transfer of power over the next 12 days), its better to shut it off than keep it around in case that violence comes to pass. Precautionary principle applies and a circuit breaker goes off. This is a special case that sits within a much broader question of where, how, and whether speech is regulated online. We clearly haven't gotten very far along in that discussion yet, but society needs time to even be able to have that conversation intellectually and legislatively. If a peaceful and orderly transition of power is unable to occur, unfortunately we may never be given that time.
  • ashtonkem 6y ago
    Not just "unable to moderate". Every platform has some content that they struggle to moderate due to scale issues. The issue with Parler is that they purposefully attracted the absolute dregs of society, and now there isn't much else on it other than plans and threats of violence. They're a half step above Gab, barely. Edit: I'll note that Parler banned the DevinNunesCow parody account. They are fully capable of moderating when they want to, they just don't want to moderate calls for violence.
    • eropple 6y ago
      Right. This isn't a "can't moderate, too much!" problem. This is a "won't moderate, the CEO says so" problem.
      • bra-ket 6y ago
        That’s called free speech.
        • JMTQp8lwXL 6y ago
          There seems to be a common misconception around free speech: that it is limitless. It isn't. "As the Supreme Court held in Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969), the government may forbid “incitement”—speech “directed at inciting or producing imminent lawless action” and “likely to incite or produce such action” (such as a speech to a mob urging it to attack a nearby building)." https://www.britannica.com/topic/First-Amendment/Permissible-restrictions-on-expression https://www.britannica.com/topic/First-Amendment/Permissible...
• e_commerce 6y ago
  Totally insane. Information warfare is escalating dramatically and is poised to turn into real violence.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• ashtonkem 6y ago
  Again, get known for being the place where coups are planned, and you won't enjoy the consequences. The free market is a lovely thing.
• erichocean 6y ago
  When I suggested AWS would do this yesterday, I was downvoted like crazy. Same with the Apple/Parler ban. What reality are people living in? Because whatever it is, your ability to predict actions in the real world is poor.
• brink 6y ago
  Why do these companies suddenly now care about enforcing the mantra of the integrity of the electoral system now, and not in 2016? Why do these companies suddenly now care about sites hosting content that encourages violent activity now, and not in June?
  • timmytokyo 6y ago
    January 6, 2021.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • nostromo 6y ago
    Because the Democrats have the presidency, senate, and house. Corporations have been sucking up to the powerful since forever.
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    • vyhd 6y ago
      It's a damning indictment of "big tech" that it took Democrats having a trifecta in federal government and a violent mob breaking into the Capitol during a congressional session to get this level of investment in moderating, well after the hate on their platform has metastasized.
    • sgregnt 6y ago
      My feeling is that from the business point of view the big tech do want regulation, the infrastructure needed to moderate contents will carb competition and cement their leader role. The thing is that the leadership of these companies feels bad about censoring contents on moral grounds. They thing deeply about these issues, they are smart good passionate people who care about their product and society. Now that the demand for censoring data is unstoppable they will comply. They will also slowly evolve to start buying politicians (with all the reserves they have) to have a say in the legislation. Just like big pharma, mikitary industry, oil companies, cigarettes business and some others.
• CryptoGhost 6y ago
  I have to give AWS some credit for this exchange with the customer. Normally in a situation like this the hosting company will never give you specifics and just ban your account. The fact that they specifically point out which user generated content is specifically breaking ToS is a refreshing change of pace. It's also hard to argue whataboutism as more and more news and political websites shut down comments and user generated content and easily finding posts from nutjobs gets rarer.
• mimikatz 6y ago
  Great! lets have ISPs start blocking these sites. I am looking at you Verizon and ATT.
  • Acrobatic_Road 6y ago
    I can't believe people are cheering this on.
    • rajacombinator 6y ago
      Not with a bang, or a whimper, but a celebration!
  • netsharc 6y ago
    I don't have a problem with Amazon kicking this service out, but I do wonder how far it could go. What if the power company tell the individuals, "we do not wish to supply electricity to you". Or their phone company. It would be a bit like China's social score and the banishment of people deemed bad by the system, but with an interesting corporate twist. Will there be a Trump-loving phone company to service these people, powered by Trump-loving electricity supplier? It'd be the libertarian wet dream. And what if it starts hitting people I'm sympathetic with? PayPal froze WikiLeaks' account and I found that to be a cowardly action by them.
  • doomleika 6y ago
    You just proved The Great Firewall is the right choice.
• blhack 6y ago
  Are all of the people here who are saying that parler is full of all sorts of bad things actually on the website, or are you just sortof assuming that? I went to go look at the site, and it requires me to sign in to do anything, and that requires a phone number. I don't want to give them my phone number. Have you guys all seriously gone and signed up for accounts, given these people your phone number, and actually gone looking around? I have family members who use this website. They're not neo nazis who are planning political violence, and I know for a fact that they would be mortified to know of somebody who fit that description in their social group. They're your standard issue Irish Catholics from northern Minnesota who heard that conservatives weren't allowed on twitter anymore, so they went and signed up for parler accounts (a petty revolution, but there isn't a lot to do in N. Minnesota in January except ice fish and snowmobile).
  • CryptoGhost 6y ago
    It's a fair distinction. Applications that have private messaging systems that have exchanged all sorts of bad / illegal content to parties haven't been cancelled by their hosts or held up to such high moderation standards.
  • ceejayoz 6y ago
    Screenshot examples aren't hard to come by. 30 seconds of searching Twitter: https://twitter.com/StanCollymore/status/1347969923289657344 https://twitter.com/StanCollymore/status/1347969923289657344 https://twitter.com/Olivia_Beavers/status/1347957434120351748 https://twitter.com/Olivia_Beavers/status/134795743412035174... https://twitter.com/parlertakes/status/1347050705110986753 https://twitter.com/parlertakes/status/1347050705110986753 The @parlertakes account is a gold mine for it, if you're genuinely interested.
    • blhack 6y ago
      I'm not saying that there isn't violent content there. I'm sure there is, but there is also violent content on reddit, tik tok, twitter, facebook, and every other social media site that has ever existed. My point is just: it seems like people are claiming that parler exists only for this content, or that they're somehow encouraging it or something. But I'm just curious how people came to this conclusion if none of us even have accounts there. I have seen some interviews with staff members there and they just seem like normal business-type people.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• t-writescode 6y ago
  So if the argument is around lack of moderation, where can an E2E encryption service exist in the cloud? They’re literally unable to moderate in a meaningful way.
  • ceejayoz 6y ago
    That sort of service can justifiably say "we're not aware of the infringing content". AWS indicates in their email quoted in the article that Parler is aware, but slow and/or unwilling to take action. > This is further demonstrated by the fact that you still have not taken down much of the content that we’ve sent you.
    • t-writescode 6y ago
      And then they’re given several screenshots of E2E encrypted chat rooms and they say they’re unable to take action on it because they don’t know the ID of those rooms, it’s just basic data in and out of their servers. And then they are legislated against because ‘they could be terrorists planning things and Signal or whomever won’t do anything about it’
• bradleybuda 6y ago
  Or, fuck them for choosing to work for a company that at best is a racist cesspool and at worst is abetting an attempt to steal an election. Every single thing that has happened with Parler was foreseeable and forseen on the day it was announced. It was never about free speech, and everyone knew that.
  • ivojp 6y ago
    Are you suggesting that their long game was always to create an app where a subset of users could organize a riot at the capitol in the event Trump lost the election? You may have less of a grasp on reality than the people who rioted. That or you don't really believe what you said and maybe it's best if each of us do our part to turn the heat down a little bit.
    • Daishiman 6y ago
      Have you seen who funded the development of Parler? The Mercer family has explicitly backed Trump and a network of disinformation media. Yes, the game was always about exploiting a segment of crazies for various means.
      • ivojp 6y ago
        I don't think it's wise to impugn an app or service because we find their investors unsavory along political lines. If that's the case let's not forget Facebook is also funded by a Trump supporter and people live stream their mass shootings on there. It seems like many are feigning outrage over a subset of parler's users' actions when in reality what they don't like is that their political opponents have found an app or service that was seemingly immune from the whims of big tech.
        • deleted 6y ago
          [deleted]
        • Daishiman 6y ago
          It's funny that you mention the case of Facebook because if anything, one of the reasons it has abstained from moderating these overt displays of violance for so long is because many of these wealthy investors do not see it as favorable to their ideological interests.
• adolph 6y ago
  “Recently, we’ve seen a steady increase in this violent content on your website, all of which violates our terms. It’s clear that Parler does not have an effective process to comply with the AWS terms of service,” the email reads. “[W]e cannot provide services to a customer that is unable to effectively identify and remove content that encourages or incites violence against others,” the email reads. “Because Parler cannot comply with our terms of service and poses a very real risk to public safety, we plan to suspend Parler’s account effective Sunday, January 10th, at 11:59PM PST.” If Amazon and Parker havnt commented, how can an email be quoted? Is Amazon monitoring the content of all the services on its platform? While my first impression is that this looks like the US turning into China, the fact that large scale private industry is doing this in apparent coordination with political forces make it seem more fascist than commie. Maybe Trump really did usher fascism into the US. What a pity.
  • ceejayoz 6y ago
    > If Amazon and Parker havnt commented, how can an email be quoted? They haven't commented to Buzzfeed. C'mon. > Is Amazon monitoring the content of all the services on its platform? They take reports. https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/knowledge-center/report-aws-abuse/ https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/knowledge-center/repor... "The AWS Abuse team can assist you when AWS resources are used to engage in the following types of abusive behavior: Hosting objectionable or copyrighted content: You have evidence that AWS resources are used to host or distribute illegal content or distribute copyrighted content without the consent of the copyright holder."
    • adolph 6y ago
      Do you think they actually read and spend time on what is written into a complaint form? That’s amazing.
      • ceejayoz 6y ago
        I've reported a number of phishing sites via this form, with good success rates. I've also had a report forwarded to me when one of our EC2 instances was compromised. Yes, AWS acts on these abuse reports.
• bodhiandphysics 6y ago
  Just one thing to note about section 230. Amazon is protected from civil liability for content on Parler, but it is not protected from criminal liability. In practice the feds don’t go after isos from hosting criminal content (frauds for instance) with the exception of child pornography, but there is a lot of very illegal stuff on parler right now (calls to kill the Vice President, conspiracy to sedition, etc). It’s not surprising parler is being banned
• Helloworldboy 6y ago
  “Just build your own hosting platform”
• quyleanh 6y ago
  > If Apple, Google, Facebook and Twitter were acting in concert to raise prices, everyone would be up in arms. But acting in concert to repress speech, no big deal. Aren’t civil liberties supposed to be more important than money? [1] [1] - https://twitter.com/DavidSacks/status/1347961063707471873 https://twitter.com/DavidSacks/status/1347961063707471873
  • pmiller2 6y ago
    Way to deliberately mischaracterize the First Amendment.
  • hehehaha 6y ago
    Do you know how long it took VW to erase the Nazi stench off of its brand? Beyond so many moral reasons for doing this, no one wants to be associated with a fascist movement. Hit to your brand is only exponential from here on out.
  • supertrope 6y ago
    The tech megacorps don't want another attempted coup d'etat to be promoted on their services in the next 10 days. A republic without strong institutions, responsible leaders, and a citizenry who truly believe in democratic values is just words on paper. Many republics just end when one person or tribe amasses too much power and then exploits an opportunity to seize absolute control.
• rubycon22 6y ago
  Just build your own website bro Just build your own host bro Just build your own financial banking system bro Just build your own water and power infrastructure bro
  • CryptoGhost 6y ago
    crypto-anarchy is coming to solve the first 3 for sure. The last one is a little bit more difficult but not impossible.
  • pizazzz23 6y ago
    Just storm the capital and start your own country bro. Wait. uh.
  • xnx 6y ago
    Just don't plan to assassinate a country's legitimately elected representatives bro(?)
    • flunhat 6y ago
      Just don't storm the capitol with zip ties and guns chanting "hang mike pence" bro
      • sgregnt 6y ago
        Just dont have some bad actors in otherwise a peaceful demonstration bro
    • paulnechifor 6y ago
      Just accept collective punishment bro.
    • randyrand 6y ago
      There is clearly some collateral damage. Relatively few protesters, versus the millions of people without a free platform to speak on.
  • randyrand 6y ago
• obvfaaaake 6y ago
  When Egyptian government turns off internet during a revolution, we call them tyrants and celebrate Twitter for allowing people to communicate freely. Yet, when US turns off a side of an argument the marginally elected majority disagrees with, we praise it. Everything is fine...
  • jeromegv 6y ago
    One side of the argument? Or armed insurrectionists?
    • Acrobatic_Road 6y ago
      insurrectionists? more like a unorganized group of baffoons. To whoever flagged me: truth hurts.
    • linuxftw 6y ago
      Are you generalizing 10's of millions of people?
      • camel_Snake 6y ago
        not generalizing. new marist polling shows ~20% of Republicans approved of the supporters breaking into the US capitol. back of napkin math puts that around 16 million people. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/most-americans-blame-trump-for-capitol-attack-but-are-split-on-his-removal https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/most-americans-blame-t...
  • vc8f6vVV 6y ago
    Not US. Amazon is a private company. Their main goal is to make money (i.e. increase company value for their investors), they decided that this activity will eventually hurt making money. End of story.
    • paulnechifor 6y ago
      Americans sure like this bad faith argument. If it looks like a duck and it quacks like a duck... If you're free to communicate anything on public owned spaces on the internet but there are no public owned spaces on the internet, then you're not free to communicate on the internet. You've privatized censorship and still call yourself a free country.
• ve55 6y ago
  It was only two hours ago when I wrote: "I'm curious if this will also escalate to low-level platforms (will hosting companies, registrars, or even ISPs start taking similar actions on a regular basis?)" when Apple removed the app, following Google Play from yesterday. It would seem this cycle is certainly not done perpetuating itself as of yet. I think we are going to have some rough times ahead of us unfortunately. I have no interest in this app or those on it, but they are probably going to get much more upset and feel much more persecuted.
  • sbinthree 6y ago
    I was wondering if you were online to see it and thinking about that comment. I was really surprised to read that, AWS is another level beyond social media de-platforming. Wouldn't there be other harmful things hosted on AWS? Who governs this?
    • ve55 6y ago
      Yes, and I think that's one of the first complaints that many think of here, e.g. how many users on Twitter are there that post worse things than Trump, how many thousands of websites does AWS host that are worse than Parler?, and so on. One might object "Sure, enforcement is not perfect and some bad actors will get by. But at least we are removing some things instead of nothing!", and while they are right about this as a first-order effect, they are missing what happens afterwards: people will, rightfully so, identity that policies are not evenly enforced, and this can have many further effects down the line.
      • bavell 6y ago
        Agreed, I think the underlying problem here is selective enforcement.
        • olivermarks 6y ago
          What happened to a cornerstone of American free world values "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it" Free speech is in grave danger
• fnord77 6y ago
  hope someone has been archiving posts there, for evidence, etc.
• jeppesen-io 6y ago
  With the assumption that Apple is a private company with those freedoms, what is the approbate response?
• scop 6y ago
  https://legal.parler.com/documents/guidelines.pdf https://legal.parler.com/documents/guidelines.pdf
• chasd00 6y ago
  you're going to see companies go back to bare metal and fiber where they peer their network with the internet and existence isn't determined by the outrage of the day and the whims of a platform provider.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • analogdreams 6y ago
    the angry mob will then go after the networks doing the peering. it's chilling to me the speed at which the censorship is happening and the speed at which the 'outrage' shifts.
    • im3w1l 6y ago
      Then they switch to microwave links and/or satellite. As those are not really possible to stop, that's the moment this war goes hot.
  • bootlooped 6y ago
    I don't think this worries 99% of AWS customers in the least. We rely on AWS at work; there isn't going to be a meeting Monday about potentially moving off AWS.
• davidg109 6y ago
  Good riddance to bad rubbish.
• systematical 6y ago
  Well this is uncharted territory. No way to know what the results of all this will be.
• techCEO4356 6y ago
  Are you a transexual?
• iakh 6y ago
  The US was one guy with a gun away from a massacre of a whole lot of elected officials. There was at one point only four leos[1] between a mob screaming for hangings[2] and all of congress because of the rhetoric sites like these are pushing. People defending them sound either entirely disingenuous or woefully ignorant. 1. https://mobile.twitter.com/TaylerUSA/status/1346913549898149888?s=20 https://mobile.twitter.com/TaylerUSA/status/1346913549898149... 2. https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2021/01/06/trump-riot-twitter-parler-proud-boys-boogaloos-antifa-qanon/6570794002/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2021/01/06/trump-riot-tw...
  • seppin 6y ago
    > People defending them sound either entirely disingenuous or woefully ignorant. The question of the Trump era, am I talking to someone that doesn't know the facts or knows them, and is cynically lying to my face to protect their worldview and argument.
• ed25519FUUU 6y ago
  People love this and it honestly makes me sick. “Because what I don’t like is being removed I’m happy” —- Now what happens when something you DO like is removed? It will be like DMCA but for political content. They start with the obvious abuse and then whack anything they don’t like with it. AND YOU’RE ROLLING OUT THE WELCOME MAT!
  • casefields 6y ago
    The pendulum will swing and it'll come back to bite those cheering this on. It always happens.
    • im3w1l 6y ago
      If we look at how communist countries have evolved historically the most likely thing to happen is that someone who talks the talk gets into the highest position and then purges both the right and the left, retaining only yes-men willing to go along with anything. Then it collapses into dysfunction as important information doesn't reach leadership, because no one dares to suggest they are wrong. Finally it evolves into a more typical loose dictatorship, where contrary information is allowed "within reason" as long as you don't commit Lèse-majesté.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
• Nbox9 6y ago
  This is an incredibly sort timeframe to expect someone to be able to migrate off AWS. If there infrastructure is docker, or K8 than they can move quickly, but if they are tied into more than a couple of AWS specific services like Route 53 or Lambda then a migration is a big ask.
  • efleeus 6y ago
    Agreed. Though I'd point out this it's an incredibly long time to leave the infrastructure in place when there is active planning of further violence taking place on the platform.
    • zlynx 6y ago
      IF that was actually the case then law enforcement would be involved and Parler would follow their instructions. As they have in the past.
      • danielheath 6y ago
        Law enforcement are involved; they were photographed at the capitol assisting the invaders.
        • nostromo 6y ago
          Apparently the cop that shot and killed an unarmed women didn’t get the memo.
          • NicoJuicy 6y ago
            A mob was literally breaking in the room where the VP and other politicians were. Yelling that "Pence must die" ( on some of them videos). You can literally see some messages that were on Parler in the articles were Amazon, is banning Parler: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/johnpaczkowski/amazon-parler-aws https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/johnpaczkowski/amazon-p... . That's crazy talk
      • deleted 6y ago
• idlewords 6y ago
  Whatever your feelings about Parler, political content moderation at the cloud services level, by a monopoly company with very particular business interests, is a serious threat to free speech online.
• quyleanh 6y ago
  It has been gone too far.
• throwarayes 6y ago
  I think the interesting test here might be whether a tool like Twitter could still be on AWS during an event like the Arab Spring to coordinate against repressive regimes. Or if those regimes could also claim the same “incites violence” exception and ask AWS to disable the service.
  • Daishiman 6y ago
    I don't know what makes you think that a) countries don't actively respond to attacks to their own institutions by blocking websites/content/providers or, b) that there's always going to be politics into play. Social media platforms are not different from traditional news media in that their power to moderate and amplify carry real-world consequences and the value system used to take such choices is bound to the politics of the time. There are truly no neutral choices here.
    • nelsondev 6y ago
      Yes, you’re very right. This is a censorship in action, due to current politics. Twitter, Facebook, Big Tech at large, are proud to stand up for free speech against governments abroad (Arab Spring), but here in the US, free speech against government results in deplatforming.
• rektide 6y ago
  you deserve it far far far far far far far far far far far far more than most but also oh shit
• fatbird 6y ago
  Freedom of speech basically always has two sides to it. If you would prevent Twitter from suspending Trump's account, then you're forcing Twitter to be a platform for the president; you're literally requiring it to broadcast the government's message. You're not protecting freedom of speech in itself when you damage one party's to protect another's.
• ve55 6y ago
  What a time for news. It was only two hours ago when I wrote: "I'm curious if this will also escalate to low-level platforms (will hosting companies, registrars, or even ISPs start taking similar actions on a regular basis?)" when Apple removed the app, following Google Play from yesterday. It would seem this cycle is certainly not done perpetuating itself as of yet. I think we are going to have some rough times ahead of us unfortunately. I have no interest in this app or those on it, but they are probably going to get much more upset and feel much more persecuted.
  • Daishiman 6y ago
    > I have no interest in this app or those on it, but they are probably going to get much more upset and feel much more persecuted. The nature of fascism (as outlined in Umberto Eco's essay in the matter) is that they will use both victimization as well as victory as means to further the narrative that they and only they should hold power. In practice, there movements are much more cowardly than they appear, which is why the crushing of fascist movements has been either actively violent, ostracizing, and causing embarrassment to its followers.
    • dukeofdoom 6y ago
      Lets just hope its not crushed by communists, like it was last time.
• condomhacker 6y ago
  Lets consider this possibility: if there was systemic voter fraud [1] then this is again another action done to supress the information and prevent from more people learning about the possible voter fraud. Not only are social media platforms supressing voices, there is also the media which has the option to decide what to cover and what not to. These are the primary ways people stay informed. Note: not an American. [1]: https://hereistheevidence.com/ https://hereistheevidence.com/
  • jumelles 6y ago
    The lies you're repeating have now gotten people killed.
    • condomhacker 6y ago
      The supression of discussion has caused creation of echo chambers which lead to people being killed. ___ I do not advocate violence.
  • Daishiman 6y ago
    Take this garbage out of the way. There was no systemic fraud. You are peddling lies.
    • condomhacker 6y ago
      A hypothesis is not a lie.
      • Daishiman 6y ago
        It's about as much of a hypothesis as it is to say that my TV works because there's tiny elves in the electronics or that unicorns are real.
        • condomhacker 6y ago
          We're not kids to be arguing over silly examples like this.
• that_guy_iain 6y ago
  If you’re going to be a hardcore free speech site you should be on a hardcore free speech hosting service like prq.se. Anything else is just asking for hassle with Hosters refusing to host the crap.
• diebeforei485 6y ago
  Time to split up AWS into multiple competing providers.
• macinjosh 6y ago
  For all the fear of the rise of fascism over the past 4 years coming from the Republican Party it appears we must also now worry about this coming from the Democratic Party. Mega-corporations acting on the behalf of the party coming into power, that will be most definitely be regulating those companies, is about as textbook fascist as you can get. However, no one who matters cares because they happen to agree with those in power. I hated all 4 years of Trump, that doesn't mean I want the elite class controlling the public. edit: please downvote me more. I take pleasure in your cognitive dissonance.
  • Apocryphon 6y ago
    Corporate power bereft of ultra-nationalism, and generic authoritarianism, are not fascism. Whatever else you can say about the Democrats, they are not in favor of blood-and-soil policies. I did not downvote your post but I find your watering down of the phrase of fascism to be worth taking issue with. As for the troubling power of mega-corporations, it’s rather sad that this is the incident that made you aware of it. So you didn’t see fit to criticize them until now?
• dstola 6y ago
  Slippery slope is accelerating. Soon any wrongthink will get you banned by the tech cabal.
  • linuxftw 6y ago
    It will already get banned from working for them.
  • winton 6y ago
    The platform is being actively used to plan attacks on our government... at a certain point this becomes a liability to any party that enabled it. As it should.
    • est 6y ago
      How do you think censorship were started in other coutries? To prevent attacks on the goverment.
    • rvn1045 6y ago
      Would't you want to read the plans in an open platform where anybody on Parler can have access to it? Now these plans will go underground and will be harder to track.
  • Sebguer 6y ago
    Slippery slope does not mean "a thing I don't like" happened. Amazon had multiple, clear asks that Parler refused to adopt. They didn't even delete posts that Amazon had sent to them and informed them were problematic. That's literally the bare minimum.
    • dstola 6y ago
      Slippery Slope means just that, persistent and constant escalation of censorship which is exactly what is happening right now. Amazon jumped on the bandwagon behind Google Play and Apple store and Twitch and Facebook for internet SJW points and to not be left behind in the "I don't like what they say" Olympics. I don't particularly agree with the messages of Parler or lean right at all, I am a staunch libertarian and believe that any and all opinions should be heard. "Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear." - not sure who to attribute it to since I don't know, but it is almost certain this censorship wave was started by a political party for political goals. The end result is the same.
• e_commerce 6y ago
  Un-American, Cultural Revolution-tier garbage.
• 11thEarlOfMar 6y ago
  America has become the nation of instant justice. Allegations are not evidence are not proof. We are witnessing a mass lynching.
  • eutropia 6y ago
    No. We’re witnessing the results of infrastructure lock-in with a risky business model. Parler’s Ops team should have known this was a possibility and planned for it. Anyone can cancel your cloud service at any time, subject to the terms you agreed to when you hosted your shit. Claiming this is a lynching is mind-blowingly insulting to the legacy of real people who were actually lynched (for nothing other than being black or brown near white people). If you want to host hate speech, you’d be wise to invest in hardware somewhere beyond the US’s jurisdiction.
  • bootlooped 6y ago
    > Allegations are not evidence are not proof. I don't see what this has to do with the business relationship between Parler and AWS. AWS alleges Parler broke their terms of service, had no realistic plan to come into compliance, and was not really committed to coming into compliance based on the public statements of their CEO. So they kicked them off AWS.
• mudil 6y ago
  How about we look into censoring family environment? Why not to take kids away from the family and transfer them to the state or re-education camp so they are not exposed to the racist parents? Where's the end to it? PS I came from Soviet Union and this is not a theoretical idea.
  • shadowgovt 6y ago
    In the US, we split the difference and take the kids for a few hours five days a week, where we try our damnedest to break the cycle of racism as part of general education.
• yyyk 6y ago
  Parler is a cesspool and I'm not sorry to see it banned. The Amazon cost-benefit calculation must have been trivial (minute AWS payments compared to talent and reputation costs of hosting Parler). Yet, this also validates the choice of competing retail chains to not host on AWS. Sure we can excuse this use of power by Amazon, but it's not impossible to see Amazon abuse it - there's no transparent criteria offered by Amazon* and no way to appeal. Best not to give them the temptation to use this power for bad. * E: Yea, they give out a criteria in the article, but for all we know there'll be another criteria for someone else when it suits them. I think one could make a balanced way which would achieve the same result (banning Parler), as quickly, without giving Amazon too much power.
• Suvitruf 6y ago
  Use saas, it's safe, they said...
  • tybit 6y ago
    Would you prefer people qualify if with “use SaaS, it’s safe, so long as you don’t provide a platform to promote violence”?
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    • Suvitruf 6y ago
      I prefer tech companies to stay away from this. All actions should be made only after court decision.
  • trianglem 6y ago
    It’s safe to promote hate they said... not.
    • Suvitruf 6y ago
      Do you have court decision?
      • trianglem 6y ago
        You can read Amazon’s list of 96 violations.
• gfodor 6y ago
  I guess my issue with this is while I can understand the reasoning, isn’t the logical conclusion to this that the entire chain of technology involved in communication tools today theoretically can provide each company involved a veto based on what those bits are causing on humans? If your CPU detects hate speech, should it be able to shut down and refund your money? If your operating system does? I understand there is a line somewhere apparently around “services” but as all computing moves towards service oriented pricing, won’t this veto power become all encompassing?
  • maxerickson 6y ago
    It seems to be the current legal situation that internet service providers can choose who they do business with. That doesn't mean that is the only possible regulatory regime, or that it is an inevitable path to some particular outcome. Is there some carrot we could feed AWS to get them to give up the choice of who to do business with?
  • GaryNumanVevo 6y ago
    This isn't a technology problem / solution. It's a people problem. Parler refuses to moderate hate speech / violence, instead choosing to selectively moderate, similar to a white supremacists message board / etc. Amazon, et. al. don't host those kinds of sites, and Parler is no different.
• rubyist5eva 6y ago
  This is only the beginning. If you think these people are just going to go quietly into the night, I think you will be horribly surprised.
  • tchock23 6y ago
    I don’t think anyone thinks they are going quietly into the night (that I’ve heard at least).
• brianglick 6y ago
  Curious: Did they just delist from the App Store, or did they also revoke certs so that previously installed instances of the app no longer launch?
  • bgorman 6y ago
    The app still loads for me
• FemmeAndroid 6y ago
  To people frustrated by this move, I’m genuinely curious if you’d be equally frustrated if this was the booting off Amazon of a forum used in part (but not exclusively) to recruit ISIS members. Edit: I’d also love to hear if you were equally frustrated when ISIS and their recruitment efforts were banned from Twitter.
  • 1MachineElf 6y ago
    As someone who is frustrated by this, and who years ago also joined now-deleted FB groups where ISIS advocates shared propaganda, yes I am equally frustrated. I believe the value of preserving and maintaining open discussions on the internet outweighs the silencing of them for political aims. In the case of Parler, they do actually moderate some content, and I believe it is conceivable they would adopt a policy to ban violence, but it's too little to late now.
    • 1MachineElf 6y ago
      > I’d also love to hear if you... Judging by the downvotes, it would seem the parent comment's request was not asked in good faith. That's disappointing, because I really meant what I said. Obviously extremist groups are problematic, but it doesn't serve us well to be ignorant of their views. One huge example of this is the Trump supporters who had no idea that extremist elements were planning an armed insurrection - by censoring that, all they have to go on is the word of Twitter, which is an organization they already distrust. I have not seen it with my own eyes, but if you look at the screenshots of "hang Mike Pence" discussion happening on Parler, there are less than a dozen people involved in the conversation. That is a very small number that doesn't do much to show that extremists on the platform are a threat justifying the censoring of the service. Again, all they have to go on is the analysis of organizations who they already distrust, who have said Trump's simple statement that he will not be at the inauguration is somehow incitement. Most Trump supporters do not buy that logic, but they might if whatever extremist conversations occurring openly were used as proof to back it up.
• daenz 6y ago
  Nice website you got there. It would be a shame if some anonymous trolls posted more illegal content than your moderators could handle, and forced you off of every platform. You're in luck, we provide an online troll protection service. For a monthly fee, we'll make sure that trolls don't bother you.
  • prions 6y ago
    Would be a shame if the Parler CEO literally refused to moderate his platform even when warned of the consequences multiple times. Nooo! Amazon HAS to let me use their business! The first amendment says so!!!!!
    • daenz 6y ago
      Could you explain what this has to do with my point please, as I haven't defended Parler nor have I criticized the deplatforming?
      • tyrust 6y ago
        If you aren't referring to Parler or deplatforming then you have either posted in the wrong thread on accident or are throwing out some really low-effort bait.
        • daenz 6y ago
          >If you aren't referring ... deplatforming You are misrepresenting me. I said I didn't criticize their deplatforming, not that I am not commenting on deplatforming. My point, since we seem to be intentionally missing it to instead construct strawmans (prions comment) or throw around accusations of bad faith (your comment), is that there is a danger in turning deplatforming into a weapon that criminals can use against people who are unable to afford to hire teams of effective moderators.
          • tyrust 6y ago
            >I am not commenting on deplatforming. >there is a danger in turning deplatforming into a weapon Seems like a comment to me.
• tmpz22 6y ago
  To all the HN users drawing a false equivalency between Parler and Twitter checkout /r/parlerwatch . There is a significant difference between the average severity, duration, and support, for posts that suggest, encourage, and especially plan, domestic terrorism.
  • dredmorbius 6y ago
    https://old.reddit.com/r/parlerwatch https://old.reddit.com/r/parlerwatch
• xwdv 6y ago
  Let this be a lesson: always have your own bare metal servers to eliminate cloud hosting provider risk.
  • azernik 6y ago
    Only really necessary if you plan to be the unmoderated sump where all the people kicked off of Twitter end up. Different services have different risk profiles.
• koiz 6y ago
  Good. People debating where is the line... they crossed it when they created the site, they knew what they were doing.
• worldofmatthew 6y ago
  For a company trying to avoid censorship, they are hard to contact. I have been trying since yesterday to contact them about others they could use.
• euler_angles 6y ago
  Make your own social media service, they said. Where does this end? What's the endgame?
  • trianglem 6y ago
    Starve fascism of air? Isn’t it obvious?
  • optimalsolver 6y ago
    Parler are free to spin up their own servers.
    • yew 6y ago
      Not if we know their names and shame anyone who sells them hardware, they won't be.
      • optimalsolver 6y ago
        You can buy secondhand servers in loads of places with cash purchases. The boys on /r/datahoarder do it all the time. This isn't rocket science, but perhaps I'm overestimating the type of people who would would run a service like Parler.
        • yew 6y ago
          Don't they get most of their hardware off eBay these days? (Not that I'm incredibly familiar with that space - I'm more interested in serious redundancy for small important files.) Anyway, the government has plenty of experience handling terrorists dealing in cash. It doesn't need to be perfect.
    • agiroth 6y ago
      No seriously how deep does this go? Private internet? Balkanize the world so that the only possible outcome is war? This isn't being thought through.
• vyhd 6y ago
  A tale as old as HN itself: a service enforces its own Terms of Service, and commenters fall over themselves to defend an absurd absolutist ideal of "free speech" even when it directly leads to a violent mob committing sedition against the United States. Spare us, please. Reconcile your ideals with what's in front of you today before insisting that we need to live up to those ideals.
  • esoterica 6y ago
    If they were truly free speech absolutists they would acknowledge the Twitter/AWS/Apple/Google/etc. have the free speech right to decide what content they want to host.
• BuzzwordBingo 6y ago
  Jesus that whole site is like a bunch of racist insane Yosemite Sam impersonators. I wouldn’t want them as a customer either.
• apta_ 6y ago
  They have to do this by the fact that Google and Apple preceded them, they don't want to appear as the bad guys.
• sanxiyn 6y ago
  If you are in any way competing with Amazon, you should think twice before hosting on AWS.
• BoysenberryPi 6y ago
  The whole Parler thing is very interesting to me. Many people point out that Twitter, Facebook, and other social networks have the same TOS violating content that Parler does but I wonder if this will come down to a "reasonable attempt" situation like Youtube copyright. Youtube and later on Twitch got into trouble with the RIAA and other major media groups because Youtube allows users to upload copyrighted material. I believe the result of the lawsuit vs Viacom was that Google has to make a reasonable attempt to keep copyright material off Youtube which brought about the ContentID system. Circling this back to Parler, Twitter and Facebook both have the same type of "hate speech" that Parler does that would violate Google's, Apple's, and AWS ToS but the difference is they can make the claim they make a "reasonable attempt" to keep those comments off while Parler does not. There's also the argument that now that the Democrats are in charge, the heads at FAANG is increasingly worried about regulation and getting broken up so it's in their best interest to take a harder stance on this. I think the coming months will be very interesting.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • fuckyah 6y ago
    The thing is that Trump did never incite or use hate speech. He did the opposite. He said stay peaceful. Go Home. Yet he was censored of social media!
  • azernik 6y ago
    Twitter, Facebook, &c absolutely make a reasonable attempt - stuff this blatant does not tend to survive long on their platforms. That short-lived content still has effects, but they're not in the Parler bucket of refusing on principle to moderate.
  • dillondoyle 6y ago
    I think this is getting lost in these threads. Parlor's intent and as you say 'reasonable attempt' at moderation. It seems that Parlor explicitly designed their moderation to fail and not actually moderate anything.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• sigstoat 6y ago
  the folks you don't want talking are still talking, they're just doing it where you can't see it, any more. your plan to ban them off all of the places where you're paying attention has been clear to them for years, and as much as you like to pretend your political enemies are stupid, they are not.
• one2know 6y ago
  AWS is screwing itself. No one will every trust AWS ever again. Why would any legitimate business use AWS ever again? Amazon doesn't like your product, they will shut off your site. This is the fucking end of cloud computing.
  • zanek 6y ago
    Parler is being used to plan murder. See the link below. Posts arent being taken down on Parler. This has nothing to do with Amazon not liking a product. People are planning actual murder. Are you serious ? https://twitter.com/IntelDoge/status/1348099918381068289 https://twitter.com/IntelDoge/status/1348099918381068289
  • bootlooped 6y ago
    On August 16th, 2017, Cloudflare terminated the account of Daily Stormer. Today Cloudflare is doing better than ever.
• maxerickson 6y ago
  Discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25707959 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25707959 already.
• rubyist5eva 6y ago
  Parler still works in Safari...until AWS turns them off.
  • sanxiyn 6y ago
    Parler totally should migrate to Alibaba Cloud.
• justinzollars 6y ago
  The United States is done. The tools that this community is building to enable political censorship will surely come back to you. You can call this Democracy. But this feels like Authoritarianism. I'm so disappointed in Silicon Valley and those in the Hacker News Community that are stamping out free expression. Shame on you.
  • ecf 6y ago
    Oh boo hoo a company is being thrown in the trash because they encourage terrorism against elected officials.
    • justinzollars 6y ago
      My family fought in the American Revolution and I was an elected DNC delegate. This is cowardly and unamerican.
      • octoberfranklin 6y ago
        You have my vote, sir.
      • esoterica 6y ago
        If you think being able to trace your ancestry back to certain well connected families makes your opinions more valid and important than other people’s then you believe in aristocracies, and maybe you’re the un-American one. If you think that companies should have their first amendment freedom of association rights violated by forcing them to do business with people they don’t want to do business with them maybe you’re the un-American one who doesn’t understand what the first amendment entails.
  • camel_Snake 6y ago
    This is what feel like Authoritarianism? Not the attempted theft of a legitimate democratic election?
    • 6y ago
• rickreynoldssf 6y ago
  Unless they had contingency plans Parler is dead. There's no realistic way to move a site like that in 7 days. ESPECIALLY if they're using all the vendor lock-in AWS features.
• ecommerceguy 6y ago
  As a gen-xer all of this incessant labeling is so bizarre.
  • cjohnson318 6y ago
    What do you mean by incessant labeling?
  • jumelles 6y ago
    Like "seditionist" or "terrorist" or "insurrectionist"?
  • octoberfranklin 6y ago
    Same here. I miss Usenet. Hacker culture really has changed.
• dukeofdoom 6y ago
  "The society that separates scholars from its warriors, will have its thinking done by cowards and it fighting by its fools. " Thucydides
• AniseAbyss 6y ago
  Good. I am neither naive nor stupid enough to have any tolerance for that fascist scum. Shank them before they shank you.
• rickreynoldssf 6y ago
  Unless they had a contingency plan in place Parler is dead. There's no way a site that big could be moved in 7 days. ESPECIALLY if they used the vendor lock-in features of AWS.
  • one2know 6y ago
    They can do it, it is not hard to replace, for instance RDS with equivalent databases, SQS with something else. The hard part is they will have to find a sane ISP or non far-left marxist company to host or come up with capital for physical hardware and set up colocation or a data center.
  • bootlooped 6y ago
    Their CEO said: "There is the possibility Parler will be unavailable on the internet for up to a week as we rebuild from scratch. We prepared for events like this by never relying on amazons proprietary infrastructure and building bare metal products" So he explicitly says they didn't use the vendor lock-in features, but the "rebuild from scratch" comment sort of contradicts that.
• zelly 6y ago
  Hypothetically, how would you go about staying online completely independently? Let's say you build your own data center, buy the real estate (because a landlord could be pressured to cancel your lease), purchase all the network equipment, and hire your own full-time employees. You still need to lease an IP block and a fiber connection from a carrier (like AT&T, Century Link, etc.). Couldn't they deplatform you too? Is there any law that says AT&T etc. cannot refuse service? Otherwise, is there any way to get an indie data center on the internet without going through any other company? Every other utility seems to be regulated. For example even if you have a Confederate flag or a picture of Stalin outside your house, the local electric and water companies are not allowed to turn off your service as long as you are paying the bill.
  • whycombagator 6y ago
    > Hypothetically, how would you go about staying online completely independently? Off the top of my head, things like IPFS (InterPlanetary File System) or the blockchain
    • brianush1 6y ago
      You can't use IPFS or the blockchain without having a connection to the internet in the first place. If all the ISPs decided to refuse you service, there'd be no way to stay connected to the internet.
  • j2kun 6y ago
    > Is there any law that says AT&T etc. cannot refuse service? Literally Trump's appointee for the FCC removed that regulation (it was called net neutrality).
  • whoisjohnkid 6y ago
    Build app on some sort of decentralized blockchain ... though it might be a hurdle to get the average person to use it
  • tomjakubowski 6y ago
    > the local electric and water companies are not allowed to turn off your service as long as you are paying the bill. Public utilities are required to guarantee service as a condition of the monopoly granted them by the state. The server hosting market isn't a monopoly at all, let alone one mandated by the state. Maybe your point does stand at the ISP level. It probably should since in most places there are just a couple of them, and Internet access is close enough to essential today. https://www.nclc.org/images/pdf/older_consumers/consumer_facts/cf_dealing_with_utility_companies.pdf https://www.nclc.org/images/pdf/older_consumers/consumer_fac...
• chadash 6y ago
  A parler message quoted in this article: “On Jan * we need to start systematically assassinating liberal leaders, liberal activists, BLM activists...” I’m not on parler but it seems like this stuff is not uncommon there and since they aren’t a huge company it seems like it would be tough to moderate it. I consider myself to be a proponent of free speech, but I also think you are crazy if you don’t put limits on it.
  • paulnechifor 6y ago
    A message on Twitter: > Someone take this clown out NOW! #assassinatetrump utter evil this man! #DonaldTrump I’m on Twitter and it seems like this stuff is not uncommon there and since they are a huge company it seems like it wouldn't be tough to moderate it. I consider myself to be a proponent of free speech, but I also think you are crazy if you don’t put limits on it.
• zanek 6y ago
  Everyone saying this is a slippery slope to tech companies regulating speech are being completely ridiculous. https://twitter.com/IntelDoge/status/1348099918381068289 https://twitter.com/IntelDoge/status/1348099918381068289 Check the images there. People are literally planning murder on Parler and people are acting as if AWS, Apple, etc should not do anything. Parler REFUSES to remove these posts. I could see if it was something other than murder, or violence but I can't take anyone serious who is ok with all the craziness on Parler. I would completely agree with any conservative or person of any political persuasion if AWS, Apple, etc were deplatforming Parler for their political views. When did it become controversial to try to stop companies that people are using to organize violent acts ? Additional Parler posts about murdering people from https://www.reddit.com/r/ParlerWatch/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ParlerWatch/ [1] https://preview.redd.it/q8szoz0pcda61.jpg?width=640&crop=smart&auto=webp&s=2d96de37d86cf049ce6994a502e0156ce5fee2a5 https://preview.redd.it/q8szoz0pcda61.jpg?width=640&crop=sma... [2] https://i.redd.it/56siiqv8fda61.jpg https://i.redd.it/56siiqv8fda61.jpg [3] https://i.redd.it/k1fgbg59fda61.jpg https://i.redd.it/k1fgbg59fda61.jpg
  • nelsondev 6y ago
    By that logic, Twitter and Facebook should also be banned from using Amazon services. Facebook’s lack of content moderation in Myanmar enabled a genocide of the Rohingya people. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-46105934 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-46105934 In about 30 seconds of searching twitter, I found calls to “kill Trump”, try it yourself. https://ibb.co/vvtBkvc https://ibb.co/vvtBkvc https://ibb.co/MSDRRNT https://ibb.co/MSDRRNT https://ibb.co/cbHrQpf https://ibb.co/cbHrQpf Deplatforming Parler is clearly politically motivated, likely for BigTech to suck up to the Dems with Dems seizing House, Senate, President.
    • zanek 6y ago
      I have reported posts like that to Twitter and its been removed. Parler's CEO said they arent removing posts from anyone because Parler is "leading the protection of free speech online". Just because someone posts something like that on Twitter does not make both equal. I've yet to see these terror planning posts get taken down on Parler
• pupdogg 6y ago
  Anyone know Parler’s tech stack? What do they use AWS for? Are they all serverless or primarily using S3 and RDS or maybe DynamoDB?
  • dannyw 6y ago
    They don’t use any of AWS’s services other than EC2 and bare metal, because they don’t want to be locked in.
  • treefiddystore 6y ago
    I was feeling nosey about this so looked at their open roles. Golang, postgres, cassandra, scylla, nodejs, vue, angular and wordpress all got a mention
• tomohawk 6y ago
  The tech monopolies will go to any length and use any excuse to protect their monopoly power. Looks like they're now in the backscratching business. This is just a pretext for them to do what they would have found an excuse to do anyway.
• mzmoen 6y ago
  Ben Thompson over at Stratechery had a pretty good post on approaching content moderation here https://stratechery.com/2021/trump-and-twitter/ https://stratechery.com/2021/trump-and-twitter/ Will be interesting to see what he says next week about AWS, as that's further down the stack than something like Twitter.
• TheSpiciestDev 6y ago
  How long until their registrar or nameserver provider bounces them, too?.. how upstream will this go?
  • mopsi 6y ago
    A few days ago the head of the largest flight attendant union called for all protesters to be banned from flights home: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/live-update/pro-trump-mob-breaches-u-s-capitol/association-of-flight-attendants-president-says-violent-protesters-should-be-banned-from-flying https://www.pbs.org/newshour/live-update/pro-trump-mob-breac... I don't like where this is heading. China has blocked millions of “discredited” travellers from buying plane or train tickets as part of the country’s controversial “social credit” system aimed at improving the behaviour of citizens. - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/01/china-bans-23m-discredited-citizens-from-buying-travel-tickets-social-credit-system https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/01/china-bans-23m...
    • el_nahual 6y ago
      Of all the bans, placing people who were at a violent, anti-government "protest" on the no-fly list actually seems like the most defensible one.
      • ridaj 6y ago
        Not without due process.
        • koolba 6y ago
          Which is the core problem with the no fly list. Most times people don’t even know they’re on it till they try to fly, and even then they don’t know why.
      • lhball 6y ago
        Granted, but how long until its used as precedent to put you on a list?
• Fordec 6y ago
  This is the power of network effects. Being kicked of one service is survivable. Getting kicked off all the major ones is a real existential threat to any company. Network effects aren't just users talking to other users, but platforms with overlapping terms of service clauses and what they allow and don't allow. Find yourself in the Venn diagram of what most of them won't allow and your system becomes functionally unworkable in today's society. The flip side of this is that if, years from now there's a "free speech" payment processor, cloud host, social network and all the rest, de-platforming for a different subculture than the current mainstream service providers allow becomes harder. We talk about the balkanization of the internet, but there's a possible future where there is a balkanization across cultural lines based on overlapping ethos, not just geographical divisions.
• cromwellian 6y ago
  The fastest way to get booted or "moderated" on Parler is to post material critical of Trump or the GOP, there's numerous people posting screenshot/evidence of their bans on Twitter, so it's quite clear Parler actually isn't truly about free speech, and does have the capability to moderate content. https://happymag.tv/parler-free-speech-social-media-banning-users/ https://happymag.tv/parler-free-speech-social-media-banning-... This means that all of the high minded talk of freedom of speech by the founder is really just a charade, and Parler is really just a right-wing social network.
• dukeofdoom 6y ago
  Statement by John Matze "Sunday (tomorrow) at midnight Amazon will be shutting off all of our servers in an attempt to completely remove free speech off the internet. There is the possibility Parler will be unavailable on the internet for up to a week as we rebuild from scratch. We prepared for events like this by never relying on amazons proprietary infrastructure and building bare metal products. We will try our best to move to a new provider right now as we have many competing for our business, however Amazon, Google and Apple purposefully did this as a coordinated effort knowing our options would be limited and knowing this would inflict the most damage right as President Trump was banned from the tech companies. This was a coordinated attack by the tech giants to kill competition in the market place. We were too successful too fast. You can expect the war on competition and free speech to continue, but don’t count us out." https://www.parler.com/profile/John/posts https://www.parler.com/profile/John/posts
  • shadowgovt 6y ago
    TIL Parler was all free speech. When did they co-opt HN? ;)
• markus_zhang 6y ago
  >But the essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In reality, it is the ensemble of the social relations. We should really fear the very near future in which it's so easy to assasinate a man by simply pushing a button and cut off all of his social relations.
  • amanaplanacanal 6y ago
    I'm pretty sure there is no button which could cut off all my social relations.
  • courtf 6y ago
    What world do you live in where a fascist recruitment tool being banned is equivalent to losing all contact with other humans? Are you under the impression that this is the first time something like this has happened? World keeps right on spinning.
• alexggordon 6y ago
  Relevant to this: Amazon has told Parler it's pulling the plug on its hosting midnight pacific time Monday[0]. I think big tech regulation might become the new bipartisan topic de jour as a result of this. Ironically, given past positions of the Supreme Court[1], I really don't see private companies being forced to host whatever content people what them to being a thing at any point in the near future, so it seems as though they'd probably be against anything conservatives have been demanding for as of recent. This might be the rye talking at this point, but one of the preceding events to the civil war was violence in the house of congress[2]. Don't need to tell anyone about Wednesday's violence, but that did cause us to miss the almost-fist-fight on Tuesday[3]. I don't think we're headed towards civil war yet, but I think how the people that instigated the recent events are handled, by the public and criminally, will dictate that. [0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/01/09/amazon-parler-suspension/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/01/09/amazon-... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masterpiece_Cakeshop_v._Colorado_Civil_Rights_Commission https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masterpiece_Cakeshop_v._Colora... [2] https://www.history.com/news/charles-sumner-caning-cilley-duel-congressional-violence https://www.history.com/news/charles-sumner-caning-cilley-du... [3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/01/07/congress-fistfight https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/01/07/congress-fi...
• seneca 6y ago
  Everyone saying they deserve it for "facilitating attacks on the US government", ask yourself if you believe Antifa should be kicked off of every platform they exist on for burning police stations. This is hypocrisy. Far too much of modern tech is held by companies happy to use it as a political weapon, and all for one side. I'm disgusted by the people who populate Parler, but I'm actually afraid of these tech authoritarians.
  • forserious 6y ago
    Damn! You're right. Who should we reach out to and ask them to stop saying what they're saying? Maybe you can point me to the leader of the atheists while you're at it.
    • dang 6y ago
      We've banned this account for trolling. Please don't create accounts to break HN's guidelines with. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  • cheeze 6y ago
    Yeah, I fully think that a social network that doesn't censor the calls to burn police stations should be banned. I don't care what side it's from, enticing violence on a large scale isn't okay.
    • seneca 6y ago
      Well, I disagree but I respect the internal consistency. You're a step ahead most of the people supporting this nonsense.
      • forserious 6y ago
        You disagree with the idea that calling for violence one a large scale isn't ok?
  • leshokunin 6y ago
• jariel 6y ago
  There are quite a number of people on Parler promoting and quasi-coordinating literal assassinations. This is a pretty good lesson on the parameters of 'free speech'. If there is no moderation on a platform, people will use it to organize straight up murder. So there 'must be a line' somewhere, and then it gets complicated from there. (Edit: I don't mean necessarily a legal line on expression, rather, companies 'have to moderate' forums somehow.) Also - a wrench in the logic - Twitter is still used by some 'very bad hombres' - Ayatollah Khomeini is still on Twitter and uses it to say some things considerably more outrageous and ostensibly violent than Trump ever has. So I feel that there's some hypocrisy here, Twitter could probably let go of him as well if they for their own reasoning believe that Trump has incited violence. I feel that we often use different standards for internal politics than we do for geopolitics (we often look the other way when people do stuff elsewhere) Twitter might want to reconsider.
• dukeofdoom 6y ago
  Statement by John Matze "Sunday (tomorrow) at midnight Amazon will be shutting off all of our servers in an attempt to completely remove free speech off the internet. There is the possibility Parler will be unavailable on the internet for up to a week as we rebuild from scratch. We prepared for events like this by never relying on amazons proprietary infrastructure and building bare metal products. We will try our best to move to a new provider right now as we have many competing for our business, however Amazon, Google and Apple purposefully did this as a coordinated effort knowing our options would be limited and knowing this would inflict the most damage right as President Trump was banned from the tech companies. This was a coordinated attack by the tech giants to kill competition in the market place. We were too successful too fast. You can expect the war on competition and free speech to continue, but don’t count us out." https://www.parler.com/profile/John/posts https://www.parler.com/profile/John/posts
  • sanxiyn 6y ago
    It is smart of them not to rely on proprietary AWS services. I suggest migrating to Alibaba Cloud.
    • azurezyq 6y ago
      However Trump doesn't like Chinese companies. Maybe an european one?
      • ausjke 6y ago
        which one?
      • desiarnezjr 6y ago
        https://cloud.yandex.com https://cloud.yandex.com :)
  • ttul 6y ago
    > This was a coordinated attack by the tech giants to kill competition in the market place. Nah, I don't buy that. The tech giants are booting Parler off their platforms because it's unprofitable. Imagine being Apple and choosing to keep Parler's app online when Amazon has booted them off. Or vice versa. You don't want to be the "last man standing" and subject to, effectively, a boycott of your services, or at the very least a bunch of terrible PR.
• twodave 6y ago
  You can't really blame them, but I do wonder whether a private company ought to have so much power. Some speech (that presents a CLEAR and imminent danger) should absolutely be regulated--but as platforms grow the levers for enforcement shift increasingly from the government to corporations, and I'm convinced that that isn't a good thing.
  • nexuist 6y ago
    The cohesive argument I've seen these platforms make isn't that this speech shouldn't be regulated, but that there should be legal rather than cherry-picked consequences for the instigators. Meaning: if someone is making death threats, go ahead and arrest them and try them in court under whatever laws they have violated. If they have not violated any laws, then that speech is legal and should be allowed to stay up. Right now there is a weird middle ground where nobody is directly prosecuted but they do face consequences in the form of de-platforming. But if someone is so dangerous that they do not deserve a platform, then the right answer is obviously not to take away their Twitter privileges, but to place them in jail where they cannot continue to cause more harm. If they are not deemed harmful enough to jail, then de-platforming them is (they argue) unfair.
    • twodave 6y ago
      I agree--they should be investigated and then charged with crimes. I'd just prefer if someone's going to be silenced that it arise from a court order, not some corporation's potentially-compromised sense of morality/decency.
• war1025 6y ago
  I read somewhere yesterday that "political orientation" should be added as a protected class. I think there is a lot of merit to that idea.
• eganist 6y ago
  Something I don't think I've heard very many people ask: Are the Apple/Google evictions as well as the AWS eviction a consequence of the attack on the Capitol, or are they a consequence of something else? Such as FOSTA/SESTA? Parler got booted for not moderating anything, but if I understand correctly, not moderating anything puts Parler at acute risk of FOSTA/SESTA exposure, and that exposure runs both uphill (Apple/Google stores) and downhill (AWS) if none of them act on it.
  • ecommerceguy 6y ago
    I'm just curious, who introduced and signed that act into law?
    • eganist 6y ago
      Oh I'm well aware it was signed by the current president. Don't read between the lines in my last comment; I'm not expressing any views because I'm trying to encourage broad engagement around this question.
• tatrajim 6y ago
  As someone who has lived in both fascist regimes (South Korea in the 1970s and 1980s) and Communist ones (off and on in China during that past two decades), I have witnessed close at hand supposedly private businesses eager to curry favor with the government by silencing their political opponents. Could it just be that the tech titans sense a means of fending off imminent antitrust action by the DoJ, through tacitly coordinated purges of conservative platforms? Surely not! On a related note, as a longtime defender of free speech, I am nauseated at the visage of tech mavens here rhetorically frothing at the mouth to silence those with whom they disagree. This has been a slippery slope indeed, starting with Alex Jones and now extending to platforms used by 10s of millions of people, whose views are now deemed heretical.
  • camel_Snake 6y ago
    I can't help but wonder if the opposite isn't at play here. It's reasonable that these companies have wanted to dissociate with Parler or other specific extremist groups but were afraid of political retribution from Mr. Trump. In your experience, did those same private businesses curry favor with governments by giving their allies preferential treatment? As 'slippery slope' as this all feels, I'd personally rather the government not get involved in these private business dealings unless they feel there is a monopoly/oligopoly at foot.
    • tatrajim 6y ago
      Then in that case they will surely be desirous of de-platforming the toxic content on Twitter, which advocates, among other things, the destruction of Israel By Iran and the internment of Uyghurs in Sinjiang. Who would want their corporate identity sullied by such content? As for the slippery slope, in my opinion we're headed with accelerating pace toward Kotkin's Neo-feudalism. The suppression of dissent is one important piece of the process. https://www.amazon.com/Coming-Neo-Feudalism-Warning-Global-Middle-ebook/dp/B07VCG8RPF/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=Neofeudalism&qid=1610250470&sr=8-1 https://www.amazon.com/Coming-Neo-Feudalism-Warning-Global-M...
• kristofferR 6y ago
  What a brilliant idea, if this trend continues conservatives soon be forced to move to darknet forums/social networks that doesn't even try to remove content encouraging violence.
  • trianglem 6y ago
    Yeah, all the venerated housewives are going to use tor and visit onion links. Listen to yourself, you’re desperate and grasping.
    • Nightshaxx 6y ago
      The brave browser already has tor integrated into it. Is it really that much of a stretch?
    • justinhj 6y ago
      End to end encrypted messaging apps are really no more difficult to login to than Facebook.
      • pixl97 6y ago
        If you had any idea how many service calls i've done to help people log in to services like facebook you'd realize what you've just said there.
    • amadeuspagel 6y ago
      I guess we don't have to fear venerated housewives storming the capitol anymore then.
  • ttul 6y ago
    Sure, move to the dark web. The extra layer of difficulty one has to go through to connect to dark web services is enough to deter the vast majority of people from ever trying.
    • o_p 6y ago
• pcmoney 6y ago
  If people on an app continually call for violence and violate your TOS you can boot them off. Especially if the app in question has no good faith moderation of content to meet your terms of service and their terms of service are either lacking or wink wink levels of enforcement. You can have ANY political perspective you want! Lower taxes, raise taxes, immigration policy, school choice, charter schools WHATEVER! You just can’t have hate speech against protected classes or call for violence. If you have an issues with the protected classes then VOTE!!! Also debate on what should and shouldn’t be a protected class is also OK! These companies exist to make money. They have a fiduciary duty to shareholders. Aiding and abetting political violence is a sure fire way to hurt shareholder value. The market has judged that “pro violence” speech is to be de-monetized.
  • MattGaiser 6y ago
    I suspect they could even have the hate speech against protected classes. Voat survived. 4chan survives. Numerous hateful websites survive. The KKK has websites. Parler was no better a week ago. These sites all get eliminated when they are tied to a violent attack.
    • 015UUZn8aEvW 6y ago
      How many violent attacks have resulted from activity on Facebook?
      • woofcat 6y ago
        Yeah, and 4Chan has about half a dozen mass killings to their name.
      • joe_the_user 6y ago
        Violent attacks on seats of government do tend to get attention and extra sanctions, I think we can admit that.
      • kart23 6y ago
        https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-46105934 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-46105934 There have been tons of instances of mob killings incited on Facebook in other countries.
• mensetmanusman 6y ago
  Parler failed to moderate to the standards of Facebook, Amazon, and Twitter, oh my
  • agiroth 6y ago
    It's not their platform, they don't get to see how it is moderated. We do, the people. You know those things we pass called laws? Yeah that determines how moderation needs to happen. Not other companies.
    • p1318820 6y ago
      Uh no, companies very much get decide how to moderate the platforms they own. What law is it that prevents Amazon from booting Parler exactly?
      • agiroth 6y ago
        Exactly, so Parler gets to decide how Parler is moderated. AWS gets to decide if Parler is violating the law, and remove it for that reason. If you want to introduce other reasons... well, I'd wager you haven't thought through the consequences of that.
        • p1318820 6y ago
          AWS doesnt need to wait for a service to violate the law to remove it. They have a TOS and policies like any other company. You can get kicked off AWS for much less than hosting a service that willfully turns a blind eye to domestic terrorism. What existing law do you think prevents Amazon from removing Parler?
          • agiroth 6y ago
            Would you like AWS to moderate every line you write on HN? Or how about this. Would you like the CEO of Parler to be telling you what you are allowed to write? That is the consequence of what you are saying. Parler moderating Parler; Twitter moderating Twitter; are very different from AWS moderating Parler or Twitter.
• gerash 6y ago
  I'm not fully informed on what content triggered these decisions by Google and Apple but if people are worried about too much power concentrations then the right approach for Parler is to sue and see how the court system decides whether these decisions were legal. Assuming the society as a whole has faith in the judicial system.
• optimalsolver 6y ago
  Comment on r/aws: >I am praying and hoping that Parler chose to use DynamoDB, Cognito, API GW, lambda functions, SnS//SQS , Cloudwatch etc. :-D
• nrmitchi 6y ago
  This feels like an insane precedent to be setting. Any platform that accepts user generated content can potentially end up in this situation. Amazon appears to be setting a precedent here that any platform that has not fully solved content moderation at scale risks being kicked of AWS. It opens the door to what is effectively a DDoS; outpace moderation capability, get the site kicked off Amazon.
  • grzm 6y ago
    > "This feels like an insane president to be setting." I think you mean precedent. (But maybe I'm mistaken.)
    • nrmitchi 6y ago
      Well that's embarassing. Updated, thanks.
• Kharvok 6y ago
  So what is Snapchat and other messaging platforms hosted on that allow of the sharing of underage nudity
  • ridaj 6y ago
    Beware the naked teenager invasion of congress
• nijave 6y ago
  AWS AUP is pretty ambiguous. I suppose if Pirate Bay and Wikileaks found a way, Parler can too. Honestly, it's a bit surprising they chose AWS at all if they were just using bare metal products as another post suggests https://aws.amazon.com/aup/ https://aws.amazon.com/aup/
• xref 6y ago
  Parler could of course get back on AWS/Apple/Play Store if they chose to moderate their worst element, but the CEO decided they won’t do that. I’d guess at least part of his reasoning is because they wouldn’t have enough remaining non-violent conservative voices, because non-violent conservative voices weren’t banned from Twitter/FB etc, the violent and conspiratorial fringe was.
• 346346346 6y ago
  > Amazon on Saturday kicked Parler off its Web hosting services. Parler, a social network favored by conservative politicians and extremists, was used to help plan and coordinate the January 6 attempted coup on Washington D.C. It has recently been overrun with messages encouraging “Patriots” to march on Washington D.C. with weapons on January 19. Was this an "attempted coup" as well: > https://www.cnn.com/us/live-news/george-floyd-protests-05-31-20/h_cb459ab077b164295d8d61d80987e3fb https://www.cnn.com/us/live-news/george-floyd-protests-05-31... > More than 60 US Secret Service Uniformed Division officers and special agents were injured starting Friday night through Sunday morning near the White House as protests rocked Washington, DC, following the death of George Floyd last week, according to a statement from the Secret Service.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
• bgorman 6y ago
  Did anyone here actually use Parler? I installed it, and as a new user the default experience is basically a Twitter clone, but with only prominent right wing celebrities like Sean Hannitty. I didn’t see any hateful trending topics here. My personal opinion is that it seems Parler is getting somewhat screwed here. Sure, maybe there was some hateful content somewhere, but it certainly wasn’t being promoted to new users. Every online site has people trolling and spewing hate, but Parler is a tiny site with minimal funding. I get that people want a scapegoat, but I do not think this is constructive.
  • ttul 6y ago
    Parler is a 33-person company, according to LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/parlerllc/insights/ https://www.linkedin.com/company/parlerllc/insights/). Although they punch far above their weight in publicity, they are a mere afterthought compared with Twitter when viewed in financial terms. The AWS ban will most likely end this company. Anyone who pops up to replace Parler will eventually face the same scrutiny and fate. Ultimately, my personal opinion is that the Parler ban is a tremendously good thing for the world. The people who are subject to being radicalized by social media are less likely to become radicalized if they are not exposed to content. Removing Parler removes the content; this will reduce the radicalization. If you think that the typical conspiracy theorist on Parler is capable of critical thinking, you're mistaken.
  • jahewson 6y ago
    Sounds like you conducted a thorough investigation!
• ausjke 6y ago
  This move will lead to new innovations,say a new network service designed that will be bulletproof against the big cloud providers or even the pipe providers(AT&T,etc), something like P2P or dark net. I'm expecting telecom vendors to chime in to cut off the network for the voices they do not like. I used to think telegram/signal are designed for some other countries, never thought it could be useful for USA where free speech is guaranteed by the constitutions, no more.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• illuminati1911 6y ago
  It’s kind if funny and ironic seeing arguments like ”they need moderation”, ”we can’t allow violent extremists yadda yaddah...” Yet this was never a problem and still isn’t anywhere else except in the context of Trump supporters. Radical left wing terrorist groups and openly violent people are directly getting funded and praised by the owners of these platforms not only tolerated.
• mgkimsal 6y ago
  Please let them move to a Ukraine-based host. We can then watch as true patriots discover Hunter Biden's Burisma connections laundering oil and gas money through cloud hosting operations supporting Parler. Parler itself will then be unmasked as a major false flag operation perpetrated by antifa and well-known long-con artists "BLM". True patriots will identify that they've known all along, and were simply trying to infiltrate it and get the final dirt on Uranium One and pull HRC in prison. I'm half-joking, half-serious, but I'm not sure which half is which at this point...
  • solipsism 6y ago
    Saying shit like Parler itself will then be unmasked as a major false flag operation perpetrated by antifa and well-known long-con artists "BLM" and then saying I'm half-joking, half-serious, but I'm not sure which half is which at this point is the type of shit that needs to be flagged. Leave that kind of trash on Parler.
• muglug 6y ago
  Dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25707959 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25707959
• throwitaway1235 6y ago
  I'm curious to see how far things have gone. Does anyone here believe that an employer should be able to fire an employee for supporting Trump?
  • jccalhoun 6y ago
    I don't know if they should be able to but in the USA at least can't you fire anyone for any reason as long as they aren't part of a protected class? I don't think there are any laws against political discrimination, are there?
    • throwitaway1235 6y ago
      You guys are smarter than me, hence question. But I think you are correct.
    • tjalfi 6y ago
      Political affiliation is a protected class in some states[0] including California[1]. [0] https://www.ncsl.org/research/labor-and-employment/discrimination-employment.aspx https://www.ncsl.org/research/labor-and-employment/discrimin... [1] https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/california-employment-discrimination-31690.html https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/california-employmen...
  • pixl97 6y ago
    Supporting Trump, no. Then again, if you were filmed taking part in a violent insurrection at the capitol building, please don't bother coming back to work if you work for me.
    • ars 6y ago
      What is you were outside protesting but didn't go in the building?
    • throwitaway1235 6y ago
      Would you also fire a BLM activist who was recorded setting a fire, breaking a window etc?
• motohagiography 6y ago
  You know you are a moderate when both sides want you dead. This guarantees a renaissance for new p2p technologies, or a war, but still hoping the former mitigates the latter. It's very important to provide people with alternatives to violence, and every platform removal reduces the number of options by one. Discourse is the only alternative to violence. Remove discourse, and you literally walk right into it.
• jccalhoun 6y ago
  I predict 2021 is going to be the year of conservative media hammering on censorship, causing their audience to distrust the media even more than they do, and conservative politicians using it to score points with conservative voters.
  • TT3351 6y ago
    Do you think politics is a sport where people score points? Bizzare EDIT: not, you know, improving livelihoods or anything else important
• mrfusion 6y ago
  The solution to bad speech is good speech, not censorship.
  • kristofferR 6y ago
    True. The banwave will unfortunately encourage even less honest debate, just even more siloing of opinion. Non-political and left wing thoughts stay on Twitter, while right wing thoughts are being forced into increasingly extreme environments. It's pretty clear that many will soon move to platforms designed to be resilient to moderation.
  • redisman 6y ago
    Have a try at adding some “good” speech to some of those extremist threads
  • trthomps 6y ago
    We've been doing this for 20 years, it's only gotten worse. Good speech is losing and information reality has forked. We can't fix this by letting it ride.
  • tjalfi 6y ago
    Can you provide any examples of this approach working in the last 40 years?
• danaliv 6y ago
  I’m noticing that a lot of people in the discussions on this and related topics are spilling ink on themes of free speech and civil rights, while utterly failing to even mention, let alone address, the fact that seditious attacks on our government were, and are still being, openly plotted and instigated on these platforms. I don’t think any argument that fails to deal with this can be taken seriously.
• listless 6y ago
  It seems like Parler gives law enforcement an easy way to track these folks and see what they’re planning. Is it really a good idea to send them underground? I’m also reading a lot about how you can’t incite violence. We should all be able to agree on that. What concerns me is that many used Facebook/Twitter over the summer to plan riots, bombing of federal buildings and even seceding from the USA in Seattle. The problem is not that we shouldn’t take action against this stuff. The problem is that we’re doing it selectively. This is sure to worsen the scenario all around.
  • curlyQueue 6y ago
    Beautifully put... would love someone to respond to this in a meaningful way :-) Thanks for asking.
  • GaryNumanVevo 6y ago
    Most domestic terrorism leads are surfaced through confidential informants / undercover agents. The number of groups planning / with the capabilities to commit terror are small. The Michigan kidnapping plot was effectively a bunch of guys with almost no skills, they were recruiting an "explosives expert" and it was an easy in for an undercover FBI agent to infiltrate the group.
  • Tokkemon 6y ago
    The difference is this event was the heart of the government being attacked by another branch of the government. That crosses a line from though-experiment to existential threat.
• f430 6y ago
  Overreaching is an understatement. This is a heavy handed censorship. I don't recall Twitter or Whatsapp getting booted from AWS when they are routinely used for organizing riots and violence and a lot worse stuff.
• o_p 6y ago
  Bake the cake. Host the site.
• nomay 6y ago
  The degree to which people here are willing to support these actions is quite unsettling, now corporates are judges and people love it.
• jart 6y ago
  This is why telecommunications companies sign decades long leases at colo facilities. Because everyone who's worked at 111 eighth avenue knows what happens when big tech wants you out. There's no lease for cloud infrastructure and I don't know what collective psychosis made operations folks think that's a good idea. Was Amazon even obliged to give them 24-hours on the eviction notice? That sounds like just enough time for a small company to make sure they have an offline copy of the database. What was stopping Amazon from pushing a button that instantly deleted their ec2 virtual machines and then recalled their s3 glacier offsite tape backups for shredding too. This is a great reminder that even if you do all the "right things" in the cloud, it can all be taken away in a day because Ro Khanna tweeted at your provider. Western Union was destroyed for far less meddling and scheming than this and AT&T rose to power on the explicit promise to not do basically everything the tech giants have done these past two days, so maybe we'll see some disruption in the future.
  • octoberfranklin 6y ago
    > This is why telecommunications companies sign decades long leases at colo facilities. Agree, but the messaging so far is well into "you violated our acceptable use policy which would nullify our lease if we had one" territory. Even telecom leases have carve-outs for "abuse", which is always defined in sufficiently vague terms.
    • jart 6y ago
      Internet exchanges don't have acceptable use policies. Check out the Telehouse website and try to find their AUP page. If they did have one, it'd basically just say you can't use the peering point for illegal activity. Companies like Amazon are customers of exchanges and that's how they get to enjoy things like section 230 protections. But it's clearly "common carrier for me, not for thee" if you read their own policies, since the AWS AUP says "you're not allowed to host offensive content". Moral of the story is if you want your online business to be governed by law rather than aups, just buy a PC and drop it by an internet exchange and set up a contract with cogent or someone. Then you can't be destroyed because you displeased a politician on Twitter.
• keithcu2 6y ago
  People are better off moving away from AWS anyway, which is expensive and proprietary: https://medium.com/@keithccurtis/why-the-dod-should-use-openstack-instead-of-aws-6ccb677c858b https://medium.com/@keithccurtis/why-the-dod-should-use-open...
• bgorman 6y ago
  For anyone interested here is the Parlor CEOs “parlor tweet” about this: Sunday (tomorrow) at midnight Amazon will be shutting off all of our servers in an attempt to completely remove free speech off the internet. There is the possibility Parler will be unavailable on the internet for up to a week as we rebuild from scratch. We prepared for events like this by never relying on amazons proprietary infrastructure and building bare metal products. We will try our best to move to a new provider right now as we have many competing for our business, however Amazon, Google and Apple purposefully did this as a coordinated effort knowing our options would be limited and knowing this would inflict the most damage right as President Trump was banned from the tech companies. This was a coordinated attack by the tech giants to kill competition in the market place. We were too successful too fast. You can expect the war on competition and free speech to continue, but don’t count us out. #speakfreely https://parler.com/post/009ba435b68c46d4955e1cd7737fa27c https://parler.com/post/009ba435b68c46d4955e1cd7737fa27c
• godmode2019 6y ago
  We are all smart people no? Can we not see what's going on, Twitter in their early days was very proud they started civil wars in the Arab spring. This is clearly a power move to block competition, all places on the internet where many people group together start out as trash. Content moderation is only possible when you have network effects that people can't leave. Its similar to not putting ads on your new trending startup. Moderation will now be used to block all new social media startups because you can not bootstrap moderation. I'm very concerned what is happening. These companies have far too much power.
  • blueplanet200 6y ago
    > This is clearly a power move to block competition I really do not agree at all. Not all social media sites start like 4chan nor do I think this move started to squash competition. There's a legitimate need being served to preserve the commonwealth in silencing these communities, especially after recent events. For what it's worth, what competition is Parler to AWS anyways? Aren't they a customer? Shouldn't amazon want them to grow beyond belief so they can be a whale of a customer?
• therealbilly 6y ago
  Dr. Goebbels is alive and well inside these tech firms. His tactics are being dusted off, updated and put into action. You say it doesn't bother you, but tomorrow or a little down the road, you may wake up and find you don't have a voice either. What happened at the Congress was unfortunate, but I don't think the Horn Man was going to overthrow the government, or that idiot sitting in Pelosi's chair.
• salimmadjd 6y ago
  Anyone looked at the three sample complaints? 7 upvotes, 2 upvotes, 5 upvotes. For context, the post (I'm guessing he is a co-founder or some senior person at Parler) John Matze has 34,000 upvotes. These posts seem like bad or manufactured examples. What prevents a competitor from sending a few people to post these things to eliminate competition? Or worse. Who remembers Knew Knowledge faking Russian bots to smear a candidate as being backed by Russia? [1] I write this as a muslim American. In my youth having a seasonal job in a well-known resort. I had a local guy come to me, called me a "camel jockey", "towel head" and told me if he sees me in the parking lot he'll take out his 357 and put one in my head. So I have faced some nasty racism. That said, I don't agree with Amazon removing Parler on the basis of these flimsy evidence. [1] https://siliconangle.com/2018/12/26/reid-hoffman-apologizes-funding-fake-russian-bot-campaign-alabama-election/ https://siliconangle.com/2018/12/26/reid-hoffman-apologizes-...
  • prontodeveloper 6y ago
    Companies have a right to refuse service to a customer for any reason (the reason doesn't have to be disclosed). Imagine as a startup, being forced to sign a contract (under duress) that you know is not aligned with your long term goals.
  • EnderWT 6y ago
    There is a sub dedicated to sharing Parler content that threatens violence, among other things. https://www.reddit.com/r/ParlerWatch https://www.reddit.com/r/ParlerWatch. You can find many more examples there.
    • ttoomm28 6y ago
      Do you realise how easy it is to find content like that on twitter and fb and other places - why aren't they shut down and blacklisted ?
  • daemoens 6y ago
    Look at the @ParlerTakes account on Twitter or r/ParlerWatch. There are thousands of examples of this on a relatively small social media site.
• tamaharbor 6y ago
  Don’t blm and antifa use AWS to plan their riots using facebook and twitter?
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• demifiend 6y ago
  First: good riddance. Let the neo-Nazis, fascists, and white supremacists make do with Stormfront or 4chan. Second: regardless of your politics/beliefs, this is what people get for not self-hosting. 1. Putting your site on AWS is not self-hosting. 2. Putting your site on Github Pages is not self-hosting. 3. Putting your site on Cloudflare is not self-hosting. 4. Putting your site on shared hosting or a VPS like Dreamhost, DigitalOcean, Linode, or Vultr is not self-hosting. Self-hosting means you pay for your own pipe, your own hardware, and your own space in which to keep the hardware, whether it's on your own premises or in a co-location facility owned by individuals sympathetic to your views. Corporations don't exist to provide you with a platform for your views, especially if they're as repugnant as those frequently aired on sites like Parler. They exist to make a profit for their owners/stockholders, and if you hamper that mission they will throw you under a bus. Whether this is right or wrong is irrelevant; corporations will do as they please unless the state governments that issue their charters (which in the US is mostly Delaware) start revoking them and dissolving corporations that abuse their power. People keep forgetting that "the cloud" is just somebody else's computer, and that somebody else is NOT your friend or ally.
  • wskinner 6y ago
    At some point, you must rely on someone else's infrastructure. What if your DNS provider boots you? What if your ISP won't carry your bytes?
    • demifiend 6y ago
      I think you're this close to making an argument for publicly owned infrastructure or for regulating DNS providers and ISPs as public utilities obligated to serve as common carriers. Was that what you had in mind?
• ksm1717 6y ago
  Are the floodgates open?
• pyuser583 6y ago
  I’ve said it elsewhere, but can we now expect big tech companies to be more active in determining who they “platform?” The Chinese government uses Twitter to spread horrific propaganda. Concentration camps are portrayed as vocational schools/feminist awareness centers. If Big Tech decided to crack down in White supremecy, while turning the other way to the policies of the PRC, or the situation in Palestine, they’re just virtue signaling. Bedsides, I’m sure if Parler really wants to, they can find a Russian server to host them.
• grzm 6y ago
  From a couple of an hours ago, over 150 points, over 240 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25708142 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25708142
  • pszhang 6y ago
    Additionally, another post of the same link around the same time with 670+ comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25707959 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25707959
  • wpietri 6y ago
    Huh. It's already off the front page, or I wouldn't have submitted this.
    • wpietri 6y ago
      And now this is off the front page. 61 points in 15 minutes and it has been pushed to the top of page 2.
      • grzm 6y ago
        Just speculating, but I think mods sometimes do this with dupes.
      • smitty1e 6y ago
        Maybe those who control the topics are anxious that we not notice the carnage.
  • kbumsik 6y ago
    Interesting. How a post with 150 points in 2 hours could be off the front page?
    • grzm 6y ago
      From the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html > How are stories ranked? > The basic algorithm divides points by a power of the time since a story was submitted. Comments in threads are ranked the same way. > Other factors affecting rank include user flags, anti-abuse software, software which demotes overheated discussions, account or site weighting, and moderator action.
• cl0ckt0wer 6y ago
  When powerful people see the most powerful get overrun, things can happen quickly. I wonder of Bezos lies awake at night worrying about an angry mob.
  • kube-system 6y ago
    If he was worried about an angry mob, wouldn’t he try to not anger them?
    • lumpenprole 6y ago
      If being a billionaire doesn't allow you give the finger to the stupidest people in America, what's the point?
    • megous 6y ago
      More like powerful stand to lose a lot from the fall of the status quo. Revolutions are not kind to the existing elites. Even elites that helped French revolutionaries often ended up on guillotine, so... best course of action is to act in order to preserve status quo. Especially if you're currently profiting from it extraordinarily.
• awak3ning 6y ago
  Zzz
  • jvolkman 6y ago
    Neither YouTube nor Facebook use AWS.
    • rvz 6y ago
      To add to that on the OP's comment, YouTube (Google) and Facebook use their own resources and self-host on their own infrastructure. Additionally, you will also soon realise why Google and Facebook are essentially THE internet, since they themselves are domain registrars and are both part of the ICANN. So it is almost impossible for them to be 'taken down'.
  • creddit 6y ago
    If YouTube or FB used AWS I would be shocked. Especially so if YouTube did.
  • rlancer 6y ago
    They self host
  • solipsism 6y ago
    Putting aside the fact that I have no clue what you mean when you say "YouTube and FaceBook's compute resources on AWS" (Google and Facebook have their own datacenters), Google and Facebook have robust content moderation policies/procedures. That alone explains why "the same pretenses" wouldn't apply.
  • aceazzameen 6y ago
    Parler has users who are actively trying to overthrow the government, after their first and failed attempt 3 days ago. It's become their safe space because they have already been banned on other platforms for months/years now. This situation is vastly more unique and organized then the standard hate speech that appears on every other platform (and gets removed when caught or amplified). This is ISIS level radicalization in the United States.
• lightgreen 6y ago
  Next step: your internet provider will not resolve parler.com. First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out — Because I was not a socialist.
  • aerovistae 6y ago
    More like "First they came for the violent criminals"
    • lightgreen 6y ago
      I don't see how Parler are "violent criminals". I don't even see how Trump is violent criminal.
  • pixl97 6y ago
    First they came for the fascists and I was like "Ok, cool, they attempted to violently overthrow the government, rather poorly, and I'm ok with you discontinuing business with them"
    • bushido 6y ago
      Ironic since the "they" in the original work was literally the facists/nazis.[0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_...
    • lightgreen 6y ago
      I'm not sure who you think fascists are, but fascists are doing fine when they are represented in parliament instead of forced underground. We saw it in many European countries, where far right organisations participate in elections, get their 5% of seats, and everybody's happy.
  • lumpenprole 6y ago
    First they came for the National Socialists.
• peytn 6y ago
  I do not support this action. Public safety concerns should route through law enforcement, not AWS.
  • pixl97 6y ago
    Amazon can freely choose to do business with whomever they choose to. They have no legal carrier responsibility to host hate speech with violent calls to action if they choose not to do so.
    • peytn 6y ago
      I am aware of that. I do not believe this action is right. I do not support it.
      • pixl97 6y ago
        Then feel free to discontinue business with Amazon.
        • peytn 6y ago
          That’s my goal this evening.
        • WClayFerguson 6y ago
          We're nearly at the point where "Feel free to discontinue business with Amazon" makes about as much practical sense as "Feel free to grow your own food." Makes a great quip in social media but is completely unrealistic. The reason we have government is to solve these kinds of disputes and force businesses to behave. Of course, sadly, nowadays government doesn't act fairly, and will always come down on the side of their political 'tribesmen' rather than faithfully and impartially executing the law.
  • wpietri 6y ago
    They do. But that doesn't mean Amazon is obliged to do business with any particular group if they decide it's not in their best interests. Freedom of association is a right.
• bra-ket 6y ago
  I think the best plan of action is creating a new decentralized free speech platform, as resilient as a cockroach, blockchain or scihub. I’ve sent a message to sama & pg asking to add this to the YC list of ‘requests for startups’. I hope they hear. For those lurking, this is a tremendous opportunity and real need as you have half the country desperate to let their voice be heard while being aggressively silenced and de-platformed for political reasons.
  • dsteinman 6y ago
    It seems this isn't something that Silicon Valley even thinks is a problem, and that is a very big problem.
• jennyyang 6y ago
  I think it's in the interest of the FBI and CIA to covertly run a service that caters to the extremists, so that they can monitor their activities. If they get driven underground, it will be harder to maintain tabs on them, but the create a platform that let's them talk among themselves, it seems as easy as shooting fish in a barrel!
  • WClayFerguson 6y ago
    I think this last four years have proven FBI and CIA cannot be trusted, and people will get called 'extremist' by the Left merely for having differing political views. I mean we just got done watching Trump get labeled a terrorist merely for having a political rally. The leftist mob has clearly lost their collective minds and are under some kind of mass delusion at this point. We need more apps like https://quanta.wiki https://quanta.wiki that allow not just Social Media, but secure E2E encrypted communications, and file sharing.
    • demifiend 6y ago
      > I mean we just got done watching Trump get labeled a terrorist merely for having a political rally. I've been to political rallies. They don't typically involve storming government buildings and forcing elected officials to evacuate. If people are going to try to overthrow the government, it really ought to be for better reason than that a washed-up reality TV host can't accept the fact that he must settle for only getting one term as President of the United States.
      • WClayFerguson 6y ago
        If a politician who holds a rally is responsible for the behaviors of looters and arsonists and violence in said rally, then you can hold that opinion and be consistent as long as you held that opinion all 2020 long while our cities burned and literally caused people to flee to the countryside by the millions. And on a totally separate point, the police let the demonstrators into the building knowing most of them love their country, and where there to genuinely protest, and they didn't even damage any of the million-dollar paintings on the walls, set fires, or assault people (only two crazies, which exist in any group)). If this had been BLM the building would've been burned down and you would be rationalizing why is was "a just cause"
• rayiner 6y ago
  What happened to Silicon Valley? Just a few years ago, something like this would have triggered libertarian-leaning outrage, especially on HN. Remember the vigorous defenses on here of Backpage? Suddenly everyone’s clutching their pearls and cheering bans that are increasingly broad and unfocused.
  • sjg007 6y ago
    Trump is bad for business
  • xoo1 6y ago
    > What happened to Silicon Valley? Just a few years ago, something like this would have triggered libertarian-leaning outrage, especially on HN. On HN mods banned or pushed away ideological free speech supporters.
    • dang 6y ago
      We ban users who use HN primarily for ideological battle, regardless of their ideology. I've banned this account. Please stop creating accounts to abuse HN like this. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
      • xoo1 6y ago
        I don't "abuse HN" and never did. You are just way out of line with your bullshit and picking on.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • rahimiali 6y ago
    If something significant had actual happened to Silicon Valley, you’d have seen his kind of ban four years ago. These bans are big tech playing it safe.
  • tptacek 6y ago
• simonblack 6y ago
  The lesson for today: Anything that you entrust to somebody else is no longer yours. When a social medium or a cloud service shows that it is more powerful than the sitting President of the US, something is seriously wrong. Forget Putin. Trump, Biden, and all of Congress are Bezos and Zuckerberg's bitches.
  • shredprez 6y ago
    >When a social medium or a cloud service shows that it is more powerful than the sitting President of the US, something is seriously wrong. This line of thinking in the time we're living through is so, so weird to me. Do people not want to live in a nation that unites to isolate powerful individuals creating chaos in the country, up to and including the president? The idea that the president would (should?) somehow be immune to this is as "un-American" as it gets. That said, you're right on. If you're intent on building and organizing, don't do it on the private surveillance platforms.
    • simonblack 6y ago
      Today, it might be Trump. Tomorrow, it might be you. "First, they came for ...." Something is seriously out of whack when a President of the United States (any President!) is less powerful than some random company. If we go down that road, let's just dispense with the office of President completely.
      • detaro 6y ago
        That a company is not doing what he wants doesn't make the company more powerful than the president of the United States, it merely means that he does not hold absolute power.
      • dragonwriter 6y ago
        > Something is seriously out of whack when a President of the United States (any President!) is less powerful than some random company. The President is not less powerful than “some random company”. The company (and likewise every individual) has freedom to act without the President dictating to them on certain matters, but that's the whole point of Constitutionally limited, non-dictatorial government.
• Vax45 6y ago
  Any company that decides to stick its toe into content moderation has a job that is, IMO, completely impossible and will receive backlash no matter what they do. Moderating content in a manner they find acceptable is one thing, but moderating content in a way to make sure that everyone finds it acceptable is simply not possible and is only polarizing everyone. I don't think social media was intended to become the new Town Hall, but here are, and private companies are shutting down discussions and discussion platforms. We need to shoot for federated social media that actually owned and ran by the user, not by a separate company. I don't trust any government with moderating speech, but I trust companies even less (they were not elected to).
• csdude55 6y ago
  This scares the shit out of me!!! Fuck Trump and right wing fascists, but AWS, GCP, Azure, Level3, Comcast etc. can NOT be allowed to become the arbiters of what content is allowed on the internet.
  • rvz 6y ago
    > AWS, GCP, Azure, Level3, Comcast etc. can NOT be allowed to become the arbiters of what content is allowed on the internet. It always has been and we gradually allowed it.
• WClayFerguson 6y ago
  Finally "Fediverse" will now become a household word! Applications like Mastodon, Pleroma, and the platform I'm developing myself (https://quanta.wiki https://quanta.wiki) can now hopefully gain enough traction to replace the monopoly Social Media services.
  • smitty1e 6y ago
    Once the platforms diversify a bit, DNS will become the next front.
    • WClayFerguson 6y ago
      You might be right. If ISPs start banning domain names, there'll have to be some kind of solution that's like BitTorrent or a blockchain. This is why many in government are already coming after encryption itself, because they know ultimately without encryption there is no freedom left at all.
  • crocodiletears 6y ago
    The fediverse needs to find a way to abstract identity and consumption from content hosting before it can properly take off, imo. As it stands, when joining as a casual user with limited technical knowlesge, you have to guess at which fiefdom is the best for you to join, and hope that your moderators are mature, even-handed and that nobody on your server does anything to get you defederated. If things on your instance do go south, transferring hosts as I understand it is a pain in the ass, because you have to download your data off the server (assuming your account is still accessible), and then contact everyone you interact with (assuming your instance wasn't blocked by theirs), and tell them where you're moving to. Then you sign up for the new instance, upload your data, set a flag on your account to indicate that it's a transfered identity (optional). Fingers crossed your new host is federated with everyone you want to interact with.
    • WClayFerguson 6y ago
      Very good summary of some of the weaknesses in the Fediverse. Federated systems are not as good as fully decentralized ones. Today I'm starting a new experiment on my own web platform called quanta.wiki (I'm a Java developer) to investigate how to make it fully decentralized where everyone at least (at first) holds a copy of their entire fiefdom. Once the 'fiefdom' is not able to be shut down by targeting it's DNS name (hosting service), we can have a social media infrastructure that cannot be censored at all, like a blockchain.
• e2le 6y ago
  To some degree I think this is what they (Parler) wanted, it creates press and attention for them. It's free advertising. Whether it be hosting your domain with GoDaddy or your servers with Amazon, you would have to be incompetent to not believe this would be a likely outcome.
  • smitty1e 6y ago
    Diversity in all but thought.
• LimaBearz 6y ago
  Before this gets too far I’d just like to point out that anyone arguing this is an issue of free speech or “first they came for x, who’s next” is not arguing in good faith.. I’ve noticed a pattern of moving the goal post. The problem here is an insurrection and the loss of 5 American lives. Arguing there is not advantageous, easy, or particularly strong so the goal post moves to free speech leaving what happened at the capitol off the table. I really enjoy the series on YouTube “the alt right playbook”. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CaPgDQkmqqM&list=PLJA_jUddXvY7v0VkYRbANnTnzkA_HMFtQ&index=2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CaPgDQkmqqM&list=PLJA_jUddXv... This one is applicable here
  • lightgreen 6y ago
    Well, banning all bad people for the sake of all good is how many revolutions started, and resulted in much more deaths and other horrors. If you want to live in a healthy state, you don't ban people who you disagree with. You integrate them into the system.
    • shredprez 6y ago
      How do you integrate people who are hostile to the system and would rather see it destroyed than become part of it?
      • lightgreen 6y ago
        > would rather see it destroyed than become part of it? Very very few people want to have the system destroyed. Especially if you don't push people out of the system, like banning these people in social networks. Trump voters did not want the system destroyed. They believe the election was rigged. There is enough evidence of election fraud or election abnormalities. Though I believe not enough to change the election outcome. It should the job of democrats (and everybody) to investigate, convince, and speak transparently about all the issues, in particular, prosecute people responsible for problems, rather than repeating "orange man bad", and radicalise Trump supporters.
        • 6y ago
• courtf 6y ago
  So long and thanks for all the fascists!
• eternalban 6y ago
  https://twitter.com/IdeasSensible/status/1348126114724466691/photo/1 https://twitter.com/IdeasSensible/status/1348126114724466691...
• sjg007 6y ago
  No brainer. You do not appease fascists. Let them build their own server farms or fediverse and watch the world disconnect you from peering.
• soared 6y ago
  It’s worth it to quickly check out the content on Parker, gab, and similar sites/apps. Gab.com has 3 Qanon posts on their front page right now.
• ENOTTY 6y ago
  How is this submission on the front page and not this other submission from just 2 hours ago? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25707959 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25707959
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • roenxi 6y ago
    HNs algorithm has an anti-controvosy factor in it [0]. I expect having more comments than upvotes means the algorithm handles it harshly. [0] eg, discussed 2010 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1781013 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1781013
  • throwaway201103 6y ago
    The various "big provider X boots conservative platform/person Y" are all popping on and off the front page fairly quickly. The comments are mostly what you would predict.
• dhnajsjdnd 6y ago
  Should the power company turn off the lights in their office?
• spamizbad 6y ago
  A reminder: Pandora's Box was opened when ISIS was "deplatformed" on major social media sites to little outrage.
  • dragontamer 6y ago
    As was "Daily Stormer" getting kicked off of Cloudflare. Or 4chan kicking off Gamergate. Which are probably better examples to discuss.
  • conanbatt 6y ago
    I think there would be a 99.9% consensus that such activity should be deplatformed. In fact, I think even the perpretators would say that they shouldn't be allowed to do it.
    • spamizbad 6y ago
      Except here we stand arguing that ISIS deplatforming = Good, Trying to kill the VP of the US deplatforming = Bad. I argue they're not meaningfully different. IF you support one but not the other you're not ideologically consistent.
      • conanbatt 6y ago
        Maybe if you have a deontological position with the rule you mentioned, there are many other possibilities.
  • mdoms 6y ago
    Really dude? ISIS?
  • whynotminot 6y ago
    Ummm. So you're here to say there should have been outrage when ISIS was deplatformed? After the capitol situation I guess I can see the resemblance between ISIS and right wing American extremism. Weird hill to die on, but you do you man.
  • 6y ago
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• donaldtheduck 6y ago
  Silicon Valley CEOs are commies, and their followers are puppets. They're losing control over peoples lives and they're freaking out. The world is watching :')
• donaldtheduck 6y ago
  Silicon Valley CEOs are commies, and their followers are puppets. They're losing control over peoples lives and they're freaking out. The world is watching :')
• thunderbong 6y ago
  Dupe? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25707959 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25707959 (680 comments)
• JarlUlvi 6y ago
  The Great Bifurcation of Social Media will likely include infrastructure providers too!
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• muttantt 6y ago
  "First they came for Alex Jones"
• Cookingboy 6y ago
  Good. If corporations are people then they absolutely should have the right to exercise whatever free speech they want to. Nobody is preventing those deplorables to say whatever the hell they want, but also nobody is obliged to provide services and platform to those people to spread those toxic messages. According to /r/conservative the entire tech industry is ran by leftists, and leftists are stupid, unemployed losers who live in their moms' basements. So it should be easy for them to recreate their entire own tech infrastructure to host whatever nuclear waste dumpster fire app they want, after all it should be very easy for "smart, hardworking real Americans" like them. Hey, capitalism is all about competitions right? Last time I checked there may even be some money involved in the tech industry so I'm actually a little puzzled why they haven't done so already. If you think I sound like a smug douchebag in this comment that's because it's exactly how I feel from reading these news these past few days.
  • koolba 6y ago
    Saying “good” here is like saying it was good for a baker to refuse making a custom cake for a gay wedding. Just because they have the right to do it does not mean it’s a good thing.
    • tshaddox 6y ago
      Why do you say those two things are equivalent? Why can’t it be good to ban nazis planning violence on one social network, and bad to refuse to make a cake for a gay wedding? Those are very distinct things.
      • jimbob45 6y ago
        Because they’re the same thing. One group gets special treatment and the other doesn’t and somehow that’s fair. Edit: Nazis don’t exist anymore, guys. That’s a 40s German political group. You can’t be a Nazi anymore than you can be a Whig. You could be someone who agrees with 40s-era Nazi ideology but, again, you would still lack membership in the now-defunct party. I realize name-calling is central to attacking Parler sympathizers but at least be accurate.
• oliv__ 6y ago
  I'm having a real hard time understanding how all the comments in the thread are in favor of this. I mean, even if you disagree with the idea of Parler, how can one willingly support this kind of censorship? "First they came for the XYZ and I didn't care because I wasn't XYZ, then they came for the ..., and then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me"
  • JumpCrisscross 6y ago
    Free speech versus freedom of assembly. This is their collision. We resolve this by creating protected classes, a concept much of the Parler user base opposes on the grounds of religious freedom. Forcing people and groups of people to associate with those they abhor is also tyrannically tainted.
    • j8hn 6y ago
      I'm trying to understand what you are saying. Much of the Parler user base opposes associating with certain groups of protected classes?
      • JumpCrisscross 6y ago
        We force e.g. racist bakers to sell to black people. Outside protected classes, however, we do not force Apple or Google to associate with Parler. Political affiliation is not a protected class. That’s freedom of assembly.
        • j8hn 6y ago
          I'm still trying to understand. Freedom of speech should only apply to protected classes?
  • xapata 6y ago
    It's private action, not government action. That's a big difference.
• glglwty 6y ago
  How does AWS know what's hosted on their VMs?
  • phendrenad2 6y ago
    Likely someone out to get Parler taken down noticed that they were using S3 URLs or something, and complained to AWS.
• grzm 6y ago
  Likely dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25707959 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25707959 Over 400 points, over 700 comments.
• mullingitover 6y ago
  This of course brings up the highly controversial issue of whether you should optimize your architecture for multicloud or go all-in on one provider. Edit: I would recommend Corey Quinn's thread for more background, but tl;dr it's hard to get kicked off AWS and it's not happening due to political slant https://twitter.com/QuinnyPig/status/1348130385411018752 https://twitter.com/QuinnyPig/status/1348130385411018752
  • bra-ket 6y ago
    I think the best plan of action is creating a new decentralized free speech platform, as resilient as a cockroach, blockchain or scihub. I’ve sent a message to sama & pg asking to add this to the YC list of ‘requests for startups’. I hope they hear. For those lurking, this is a tremendous opportunity and real need as you have half the country desperate to let their voice be heard while being aggressively silenced and de-platformed for political reasons.
    • baskire 6y ago
      I have to agree. Much like the internet created social media. The blockchain and decentralized web will have its own popular publishing platform
    • lumpenprole 6y ago
      Yes! They could get Peter Thiel back on board. It would be like old times.
      • bra-ket 6y ago
        I think any true libertarian would support a new decentralized free speech platform (as resilient as a cockroach, blockchain or scihub). btw does anyone know what happened to Diaspora project, is it still alive
        • lumpenprole 6y ago
          There must be some way to combine a truly decentralized free speech platform with an opportunity for clean young boys to sell their blood to the highest bidder without the nanny state interfering. FLAGGED? WHAT ABOUT MUH FREEDOMS?
• courtf 6y ago
  "The great bifurcation is upon us!" 0.01% of traffic will change destination. This whole thing is a tempest in a teapot. It's amazing how quickly the HN goblins start howling at the moon when their favorite fascism and child porn site gets shuffled offstage. Y'all really thought Parler would last huh? Back to 4chan I guess.
• aloukissas 6y ago
  It looks like someone actually reads emails to abuse@amazonaws.com.
• chr1 6y ago
  And several years ago when Putin was trying to ban Telegram Amazon was the one providing servers and ips to prevent it. So the only way to be safe from censorship is to use services hosted in an unfriendly/uninterested country. Maybe they need to open accounts in Russian vk social network instead of Parler:) Jokes aside this is one of the reasons why it is important to have multiple truly independent countries, because if you have just one government for whole earth, then someone like Snowden will not have any safe place.
• ianhawes 6y ago
  Legal? Probably. An extremely dangerous precedent? Yes.
  • klyrs 6y ago
    > If we reasonably believe any of Your Content violates the law, infringes or misappropriates the rights of any third party, or otherwise violates a material term of the Agreement (including the documentation, the Service Terms, or the Acceptable Use Policy) (“Prohibited Content”), we will notify you of the Prohibited Content and may request that such content be removed from the Services or access to it be disabled. If you do not remove or disable access to the Prohibited Content within 2 business days of our notice, we may remove or disable access to the Prohibited Content or suspend the Services to the extent we are not able to remove or disable access to the Prohibited Content. https://aws.amazon.com/service-terms/ https://aws.amazon.com/service-terms/ Folks are openly discussing treason. Parler ain't moderating it. Boot gotten. Enforcing your "don't do crimes on our hardware" TOS is not remotely "precedent" setting. Besides, that only happens in court.
  • spacemanmatt 6y ago
    More dangerous than forcing AWS to do host them? Easy no.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• iamleppert 6y ago
  I am in favor of these matters being handled and adjudicated via the courts, not by private entities with no due process, arbitrary process and limited oversight. For all we know there was a limited group of users of that service that caused this action, however we don’t know and likely will never know the facts in this matter.
  • bootlooped 6y ago
    > I am in favor of these matters being handled and adjudicated via the courts, not by private entities with no due process, arbitrary process and limited oversight. So if Amazon wants to discontinue a business relationship they would need to sue their customer? What would they sue them for? I don't think it's a crime to break terms of service.
    • franklampard 6y ago
      Amazon didn’t break terms of service, but Parler did by not moderating their platform. Amazon, Google, and Apple merely terminated their service because Parler violated TOS. It is perfectly reasonable.
      • spacemanmatt 6y ago
        I highly suspect that a dispute would end up in arbitration rather than courts, too. It's not like AWS failed to think ahead about getting sued.
  • heimidal 6y ago
    The only way to bring a lawsuit is for an action to occur that triggers the suit. Otherwise, there is no breach of contract to sue over. If Parler believes they have a case against Amazon, they are able to file a lawsuit. That said, Parler almost certainly has no case since private companies may do business with whomever they please and any terms in place almost certainly contain an at-will termination clause. Parler will need to find a new host and AWS will forfeit any future revenue from Parler. That’s an even exchange.
  • 6y ago
• jimmy2020 6y ago
  I have no idea why this is flagged as dupe
• thedieiscast 6y ago
  The sentiment in this thread expressed in this thread is that "companies should not be forced to provide a platform for people they dislike". That is true, but it seems there is context missing to that argument. It appears that the tech industry operates as a cartel that has a monopoly over almost all of the technological world. This is the real problem. Ironically, a lot of people here think it is great, because they aren't coming for them. The only problem is, this is very shortsighted. They will come for everyone, and maybe one day, you won't align with their views. Many civilisations already realised the problem with this type of situation, and that is why constitutions and religions and laws were formed and created successful societies. The fact is that Apple and Google own almost 100% of the smartphone platform, which is one of the biggest platforms. Google owns almost 100% of the browser platform, twitter pretty much owns the short-form political communication platform, etc. This creates a different context, where they should really be governed by the rules of a democratic society, rather than of a couple of unelected billionaires. Another issue here is that they are essentially destroying all of their competition. Parler is competition to twitter. When the tech giants work together, they can end every form of competition against them. Nobody here has a problem with that? It seems that everybody here has left-wing views and because the tech giants align with those views, they are turning a blind-eye to everything. It is interesting that we have had months of riots and deaths from antifa and BLM, with entire blocks turned to ash, yet there was no outrage here. Suddenly, someone with a bullhorn hat on gets into the whitehouse, and it is supposedly now a green light for technological tyranny like we have never seen before. Not only that, but all of this censorship is going to create extreme violence. Without a voice, your enemies have no other avenues left.
  • pkulak 6y ago
    These tech companies have always removed calls to violence. I lost count of how many FB groups have been shut down. I just don't see this being anti-right as much as it's anti violence. Maybe if BLM folks made their own app and started doxing Twitter employees that wouldn't get shut down, but I guess we'll never know.
    • thedieiscast 6y ago
• amir734jj 6y ago
  I think it is for everyone's good that they are getting censored. However, they should have known this was going to happen and take steps to make it cloud agnostic. It is just obvious.
• gfodor 6y ago
  I assume this means literally no other website on AWS is hosting content endorsing violence. Or they plan on policing this in general now. Or they do this kind of thing regularly and I am just unaware. Which is it?
  • dagmx 6y ago
    It's most likely the last option. Enforcing their terms against one client and not another doesn't mean they are greenlighting the other client. It just means they haven't gotten around to it. It's a fallacy to assume otherwise.
    • gfodor 6y ago
      I never claimed any assumptions, just listed the set of possible things which could be true. Each of them, if true, have their problems.
  • spacemanmatt 6y ago
    It's also entirely AWS' prerogative to decide when, on whom, and how to enforce their TOS. They reserve their rights ahead of time.
    • gfodor 6y ago
      I see. So the fourth option which I omitted is that this a selective action that is inconsistent with their general behavior. I did so because I assume good faith on their part, but it sounds like you may disagree that is the case.
• dang 6y ago
  All: threads are being paginated for performance reasons to prevent our server from melting down (yes we're working on it). If you look at the top of this page you'll see there are thousands of comments. If you want to read them all you'll need to click More at the bottom of each page, or like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25706993&p=2 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25706993&p=2 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25706993&p=3 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25706993&p=3 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25706993&p=4 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25706993&p=4 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25706993&p=5 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25706993&p=5 ... and so on. While I have you: if you're going to comment on this thread, or anywhere on HN, make sure you're up on the guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. This is a site for curious, thoughtful conversation. It is not a site for political battle, snark, or name-calling. Why? Because those things destroy curious, thoughtful conversation. This is one of those moments where we can either raise the bar or slide deeper into the hell realms. We're therefore raising the bar. Please use the site as intended: curious, thoughtful conversation, and be kind, regardless of how wrong others are or you feel they are. If you can't do that (understandable, given what we're all living through), don't post until you can. I'm banning significantly more accounts right now, especially those that have built up a track record of abusing HN. The bans are not based on political position, as anyone with the fortitude to slog through my posting history can see. No matter how right you are or feel you are, make sure you know what the rules are and follow them. In particular, do not use HN primarily for political or ideological battle. Not only is that not what the site is for, it destroys what it is for, so we have no choice but to ban accounts that do it—and so we are: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20banned&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....
• tpirx 6y ago
  A protests of 1000s(tens?) of people had some unknown (be honest) number of violent actors that resulted in the death of two people. We have no means of verifying that those who committed violence did so at the behest of bad actors on any given App. We can speculate or let the media speculate for us. Speculation nonetheless. One would think that a community so dependent on data would require it. Would you have felt more safe at that protest or walking through a rough area of Chicago on any given day last week? [0] Is this really worth the slippery slope we are now walking toward? I don't know. At least not yet. [0] https://home.chicagopolice.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/1_PDFsam_CompStat-Public-2021-Week-1.pdf https://home.chicagopolice.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/1_...
  • ripdog 6y ago
    The internet is very big. Just because parler won't be hosts on AWS doesn't mean they won't find a host. They'll find a hosting company run by people as awful as them, just like the daily stormer did.
  • gedy 6y ago
    It sounds like you are describing George Floyd protests too - Twitter, etc was used to coordinate. Seems like a big double standard here.
    • tpirx 6y ago
      I will assume you meant to reply to another comment because there is no double standard here. George Floyd protest were free speech and necessary.
      • gedy 6y ago
        Not you, I meant double standard for the media's portrayal of those protests vs recent. Seem to go out of their way to call those mostly peaceful with a few bad actors, but not the other way around.
• Wolfenstein98k 6y ago
  Terrible precedent. Even the argument that "private companies don't have to respect free speech", though one that seems disingenuous as most people making it weren't saying so with cases like Masterpiece Cake Shop v CCRC, holds little water when there is no public square alternative. Because of the possibility of people saying things FAANG don't approve of, they are entirely deplatforming a platform. How can they argue that they're anything but publishers, if they boot websites for simply having the potential to allow speech they disapprove of?
• ralusek 6y ago
  I don't use Parler, but this is nuts. AWS, Google, Apple, Twitter are private (sector) businesses, and it's fine for them to do what they want. That being said, there are two issues here. One, is that even the staunchest free market advocates acknowledge that monopolies are constructs by which markets fail the public, and we designate trust busting as a necessary function of the state. This is yet another action in a series among many that demonstrates that not only are these companies beyond any reasonable threshold of what would historically constitute a monopoly, but that they repeatedly act in collusion with one another in service of specific objectives. These companies have the capability to effectively lock competitors out of even getting their footing. "If a baker can refuse to bake a cake for a gay couple, what's wrong with this?" Well, Twitter is already an effective monopoly in its space, but Parler is created as a miniscule competitor. It has virtually no chance, but it carves out a space for itself. Well Apple and Google remove it from their marketplaces, and the apk is removed from major hosts. So now Parler needs to build its own smartphones, OSes, and marketplaces. Well now AWS says they won't host their servers, so Parler needs to build and maintain their own server infrastructure. What's next, credit cards refuse to process their transactions, banks refuse to serve them? You're okay with this? Secondly, do we approve of the existing monopolies doing this? Over the last few months, militant leftists have caused an estimated 5 billion in damages, taken over police stations, burned down the Minneapolis police station, attempted to burn down the federal courthouse in Portland, set up two anarchist insurrection zones which resulted in multiple murders and rapes, as well as racially segregated spaces and speaking areas, taken down century old statues of Lincoln and Grant, among others, have beat multiple business owners to within inches of their lives, destroyed countless businesses, many of which have no insurance. But this is where the buck stops? A free speech platform that hosted some of the conversations that led to a single (completely unacceptable) act by a group? I observe a group of radical leftists on Facebook, that, in regards to the storming of the Capitol building, have said "do not question their tactics, just their motives." This is a group on Facebook that doesn't think there's a problem with storming the Capitol or threatening the lives of the Congress, just that they disagree with the motives. That's apparently the case for Facebook as well, as well as the rest of these platforms.
• rubyn00bie 6y ago
  Hell yes. The people being cut-off are literally outta their minds. Anyone thinking it's unfair is also outta their minds... or thinking it's about censorship. Nah, it's about not-supporting a coup of the USA and murderous assholes. In the USA, of all places, we don't have to do shit we don't want to do (except pay taxes). No one wants to share anything with fucking Nazis. These insurrectionists are fighting against the very fabric that gives them the things they want. They have completely disconnected from reality if they expect the benefits of a diverse intellectually rich society, but want that society eradicated, locked up, and enslaved. Do you really think we'd have the fucking internet if the nazis had won? ROFLCOPTR. Fucking ROFLCOPTRs. They're attempting to overthrow the USA's election results-- they're traitors. I'd even be against using the word "traitor" if they weren't nazi-white-supremacist fuckheads. I'm using it because they're traitors, not just to democracy, but to humanity. They seek the destruction and enslavement of others. This is not a fucking joke. FACT: Hitler was laughed at AND staged a failed coup; which went unpunished (he was having guests and was free to roam the prison) before the camps and WWII. I can't even make this shit up. It's honestly like Trump is reading Hitler's bio for tips on how to get ahead... but back to the point. If someone wants to murder me, enslave me, deeply believes I am inherently unequal, and that I am not even human; no, I will not help them. Is that strange? I have a pretty strong feeling it's not. So then no one, fucking no one, should be surprised that the PEOPLE who built AWS, Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter, reddit et. al do not want to empower those that want to destroy, enslave, and torture them. To be clear, this could not be less about censorship. If anything, it's a testament to free speech this shit went on for as long as it did. I'd even be more pissed about it going on for as long as it did, but better late than never, if we all weren't balls deep triaging an attempted coup of the USA.
• throw03172019 6y ago
  The engineers at Parler are going to feel the pain trying to get off of all those AWS services.
• jp57 6y ago
  I'm distressed and saddened at how many of the free speech proponents on HN are treating the events of January 6 as if it was just another protest and not an existential threat to the republic. The president's followers said for weeks that "the storm" was coming Jan 6. Nobody took them seriously. Look what happened. The president and his lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, and other followers incited it. Yes the execution of the insurrection was ham-fisted, and it failed to prevent the electoral count from completing, but that's irrelevant. If the mob had managed to find and destroy the electoral certificates, or if the flex-cuffs guys had captured members of congress, we would be talking about something very different now. The president has a history of responding to setbacks by doubling down. His followers have now begun talking about returning with arms. Only fools would assume that these threats are idle talk or jokes. The western liberal value of free speech has never extended to incitement of violence. My assumption is that the leaders of Apple, Google, and Amazon don't want to provide a platform for sedition.
  • oliv__ 6y ago
    OK, but given that all of the above is true, do you think that deplatforming Parler helps or hurts the overall situation? What do you think the "deplatformed" people are going to do? Just quit because "oh no our website is gone"? This event is just fueling the fire IMO.
    • spamizbad 6y ago
      I feel like deplatforming because of a TOS violation is much better than "The world's a better place if we deplatform you"
    • ehsankia 6y ago
      They won't have a unified place to plan for their next attack in a few days? Where do you think they planned their attack for January 6? Deplatforming has proven to work, if anything heavily slow down the spread of misinformation. What's the last time you heard about Milo?
      • DonHopkins 6y ago
• DonHopkins 6y ago
  "We were too successful too fast." -Parler "We’re going to win so much that you’re going to be sick and tired." -Trump
• phendrenad2 6y ago
  Just going to get my prediction in now: This is going to result in top-to-bottom divergence of tech along political lines. Someone will make a right-wing AWS, and then someone will make a right-wing smartphone.
• tomerbd 6y ago
  Net NoTrality
• Razengan 6y ago
  @dang with his ""cUrIoUs ThOuGhTfUl CoNvErSaTiOn"" charade again: Do something about downvote abuse if you really care about this shit.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• one2know 6y ago
  Its fascinating how these companies think they are fighting against some radical revolutionaries. All the Trump supporters they are scared to death of are ordinary people all over the country. There are not hundreds, or thousands, or tens of thousands. There are tens of millions. Right now this looks like a very small set of scared shitless tech companies and politicians that are overreacting when they finally had to meet people outside their bubble. This will hurt these company's businesses unimaginably. Their uptime whent from 5 nines to no nines.
• dpeterson 6y ago
  Listen to yourselves in your echo chamber of the left try to justify this. Q-tards and Antifa stormed the capital. The people you so righteously call racist and seditious are not and did nothing of the sort. What Antifa and a few Q-tards did on Jan. 6 doesn't discredit the fact the establishment politicians and our corporate overlords have sold out to China and don't want to be held accountable and would prefer to follow their script to divert attention to the bad orange man's behavior. When Antifa burns multiple cities to the ground they're the good guys but Schumer supposedly "survived pearl harbor" because patriots had their own movement and are trying to remind the actual corrupt politicians they work for us and not the globalists and China trying to keep us all locked down forever, fighting one another.
  • aluminum96 6y ago
    Citation needed.
  • CodeShmode 6y ago
    So this video from that day of a man inside the capitol calmly convincing a police officer to go home because there's thousands of people surrounding the building? Is he a Q-Tard or is he Antifa? https://youtu.be/lhjRXO72v1s?t=314 https://youtu.be/lhjRXO72v1s?t=314
• Fellshard 6y ago
  There is a vein of this that is highly partisan in nature, and it is this: faced with a single-party majority government, these censorious moves can be made now with complete impunity, and even without so much as a challenge.
• brg 6y ago
  Is this particular move by Apple, Google, Facebook, and Twitter the end of big tech in the US? My concern the following. These companies have shown that they wield a huge amount of power. With their actions in the Georgia Senate in removing Republic ads, hey have likely frightened 50 sitting Senators. The democratic party has never shied away from regulation. So we likely now have two parties aligned in their desire for control of social media. Will this result strong federal regulation for social media and its ecosystem (AWS, Google Cloud, App stores)? I wouldn't expect nationalization or audience distribution limitations, but instead perhaps application of exceedingly strong federal oversight over any media distribution platform and its ecosystem akin to early days of radio and television. An end result of this would be a dramatic change in how freely they operate, putting them in a regulatory position akin to Microsoft's 2002 consent decree.
• freedomLover 6y ago
  Really sad. Cuties sexualising children did not force AWS to ban them, however parler allowing free speech did. You win, commies. Congratulations
• telaelit 6y ago
  Good riddance is all I have to say on the matter.
• Grimm1 6y ago
  I'm just going to come out and say something that I've had a hard self reflective time coming to the conclusion of. I don't believe in free speech without limits. I have strongly felt that the actions taken by these companies is morally and ethically the right thing to do, for any business and that is inconsistent with believing in true free speech. My line for free speech seems to lie in speech that incites violence or speech that discriminates against people for immutable characteristics of their person, both of which I know Parler harbors in abundance. I think there are simply some ideas that are too repugnant to not rebuke. That said I don't like how centralized we've become on these existing platforms either. Monopoly on communication means it's too easy to let that window slide on what is acceptable speech to limit.
  • 3000000001 6y ago
    At the risk of massively overgeneralising, your conclusion is generally how free speech is generally aligned with how non-US western nations approach free speech. IMO, nobody gets it 100% right 100% of the time, but the USA model isn’t the perfect or only solution. Legislation has a place in limiting the power and reach of social media, which would naturally diffuse the kind of problems people have with big tech.
  • ceilingcorner 6y ago
    The mainstream media was complicit in arguing for the Iraq War, which resulted in the deaths of nearly a million people and is still ongoing in the form of the Syrian Civil War. Are you for shutting down the New York Times, then? The violence they’ve facilitated dwarfs that of the recent events. Edit: in case you doubt me, here’s a pretty damning article: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/iraq-war-media-fail-matt-taibbi-812230/ https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/iraq...
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    • bestnameever 6y ago
      > The mainstream media was complicit in arguing for the Iraq War So was conservative media - why single out only the mainstream media?
• Joking_Phantom 6y ago
  Freedom of Association: An individual's right to join or leave groups voluntarily, the right of the group to take collective action to pursue the interests of its members, and the right of an association to accept or decline membership based on certain criteria. There is clear conflict with how our society views the roles of private companies vs. individuals, the technology driven communication platforms they provide, and how individuals and groups use those platforms. However, it is not a forgone conclusion that censorship by private organizations and individuals via platforms they control is a violation of freedom of speech. No one has the right to forcibly silence someone else, with governments being only one of many traditional perpetrators with means and motives to do so. But individuals and groups cannot forcibly enlist others to help spread their message. My local church can't force me to espouse my love for their god, nor am I forced to listen to a random passerby on the street. These 2 principals can be easily agreed with in theory, as requirements for a well functioning society. But with technology, comes the ability to convert capital into speech, and those 2 principals come into natural conflict. The written language, the printing press, the internet, etc. are all tools that can be used in conjunction with capital to amplify speech, and drown out the speech of others via shear volume. It isn't necessary to silence someone else, if yelling over them achieves the same effect. Thus continues the ever-lasting compromise and conflict between our rights as individuals. There is no free lunch, no easy solution.
• smashah 6y ago
  As pointed out by fang's pinned comment. Sites, companies and services have rules of engagement which if broken even in the flimsiest sense (e.g snark, I've been snarky here and have been rightfully warned). Break those rules of engagement and expect the consequences. I think for those who have issues with this latest outcasting of Parker by the big three, you will have to encourage your government to treat them as utilities and support anti trust cases against them. I predict that suggestion to clash with the libertarian nature of those concerned.
• wiredone 6y ago
  Free speech is not "without consequences". There's nothing stopping them from starting their own data centre.
  • ypiratex 6y ago
    There was nothing stopping them from starting their own app... Until Amazon came along. There is nothing stopping them from starting their own data center... Until the ISPs come along.
• gadtfly 6y ago
  This is all both deeply immoral and disasterously unwise.
• whotfru 6y ago
  Just like with COVID, this reaction is probably way too late to work the way some of you hope. IMO you are probably now radicalizing the more moderate members of what seems to be a significant proportion of your population by giving them actual cause for their feelings of persecution. How is anyone surprised after years of Democrats claiming that the Russians were able to compromise the 2016 election in Trumps favour, that there are now people who believe their candidate has lost an election due to manipulation? There is guilt on both sides for this mess, I hope you guys can work it out.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• spicyramen 6y ago
  I want to see this also as a geopolitical move. We see online platforms growing, and for US products the natural growth is the following: US, Europe and Australia, then Asia, Africa and Latinamerica. What is missing? China the crown jewel. Is this move anti-Trump a way to set a precedent that Big Tech is pro China. Let's don't forget the ties of Apple and Facebook there and the need to access that market.
• diveanon 6y ago
  They should ban gay wedding cakes along with Parler, then conservatives would be fine with this right? Germany decided a long time ago that free speech has limits, if you tolerate intolerance it leads to fascism. History has proved that several times. Personally I would love to hear what is going on behind the scenes at Parler from a devops perspective. Were they just running ec2? In which case leasing a data center will be inconvenient but manageable. If they were using more of the managed products then good riddance. I'm curious if the devs at Parler will put it on their resumes when looking for a new job.
• malwarebytess 6y ago
  I feels so conflicted about this kind of deplatforming. I find the people ignorant and topics discussed there of little value. It's mostly just actual lies, misunderstandings, blatant propaganda, stupidity, circlejerking, echo chambers. It's shit, to be blunt. I find it endlessly annoying. But I sorta think they should be able to have their space? I don't like the way corporations and governments build these huge marketplaces, make them more and more restrictive such that no one can really get huge market-share without them and then they start curating (censoring). I understand why they do it: image, ethics (lol), they can, network effects, control over product quality, increased community cohesion, customer comfort, "safety" (lol), legal (i don't buy this one) and so on. But it wouldn't be a problem if the internet remained decentralized...these big companies should never be in the position to have this power. At a certain point you get so locked out that you can't even pay the bills anymore because even payment processors won't take your money!
• supergirl 6y ago
  they ban parler but are OK with hosting pornhub that literally has child porn content
• bleah1000 6y ago
  I think that this is a really bad idea. I believe that this is selective enforcement because on Twitter there is a ton of incitement to violence. I think it's worse on Twitter because it happens all of the time, and Twitter seems fine with it when it's far left folks. During the George Floyd riots in Portland, at least a few Antifa groups were using Twitter to organize their "protests". If you think that Trump's tweets were incitement, then those tweets were just as bad or even worse. Those protests didn't result in any police/feds dying, but a ton of police/feds were injured, and a lot of antifa type people were trying to kill, they just weren't very good at it. But in my view, I see this idea that people are being radicalized through social media (YouTube, Twitter, Facebook) will be the same as the video games are causing violence ideas. I think what we are going to find out in the future is that allowing people to vent their crazy on the internet was more likely to let people blow off steam and wind them down. The few people who do act violently and vent about it on places like Twitter, were people who were already prone to violence. Kind of like in the video game blame game when people who were violent, the news always said that they played violent video games. In that case, those people were already violent and liked violent video games. Even those people who are "radicalized" by social media are probably people who could be radicalized by watching cat videos. Now that's not to say that some people who are on the fence might be radicalized by social media, but I think it's also possible that more people are being deradicalized by allowing them to see all the things, bad or good. Of course, illegal threats should still be removed, but if these social media sites came up with a set of rules and actually followed them even when they didn't like the person, I think that would also go a long way to calming things. Some people will still cry about getting punished unfairly, but I think it's more likely fewer people will agree when they claim they were being persecuted when the rules are followed to the letter. The biggest worry I have is that all of these deplatforming actions are actually going to lead to violence as people feel like they no longer have any way to express themselves. I really fear that tensions are escalating and these companies are making worse, not better.
• suyash 6y ago
  Make a web app that works well on mobile browser and escape the App Store police.
  • phendrenad2 6y ago
    Logically, if Parler should be removed from the app store, Safari should also refuse to connect to it. Either way, it's Apple providing your access.
    • suyash 6y ago
      In the past that has not happened, the reason open web wins is because of freedom.
• RedComet 6y ago
  Cyberpunk 2021 but instead of getting leg modifications to jump over buildings, you're stuck in your home wearing a surgical mask and only allowed to watch corporate approved news.
• shanemlk 6y ago
  I don't even care about the free speech argument. Ban the racists, great. All I'm saying, is that Cthulhu is not happy Signal is #1 in the app store right now. Big tech/brother/whatever will never be your friend. The zeitgeist wants to eat you. The drone in your window will see you downloading that decentralized OS (I hope that's just poetry).
• FireflyChild 6y ago
  It's pretty dumb, since I guarantee more people organize violence via Twitter and Facebook than Parler. Even via Gmail. There's a bunch of Antifa accounts that conduct doxxing and organise riots on Twitter. Why is Twitter fine?
• cpeterso 6y ago
  No shoes, no shirt, no service.
• davesque 6y ago
  Part of what makes this situation interesting/concerning is that it's not hard to imagine that censoring unwanted or problematic speech might become technically infeasible at some point in the not so distant future. I'm not at all a crypto maximalist. However, let's assume that the technical questions about the viability of large-scale, highly performant distributed apps running on blockchains get worked out. Assuming we eventually do have something like a de-centralized Facebook running on something like Ethereum, how could we ever expect to avert situations like this in the future by moderating content? If that content was stored on an immutable blockchain, it might be impossible to moderate. The only solution would be to somehow take down the entire blockchain network. Related to this, there seems to be something important about the interactivity and responsiveness of a social media platform that's connected with how useful it could be to organize movements like this. Maybe, if it turns out that blockchain-based solutions can't get around having the built-in latency of something like a block time, then dapps will never be viable alternatives to centralized social media platforms.
  • ghthor 6y ago
    Than goodness for this potential future. I think is why the blockchain is so demonized by the tech community, because it free the people from tge slavery to the large corporations that's making them money hand over fist.
• mikaeluman 6y ago
  I’ve said it before: I find this highly disturbing. Especially the sense in which it is coordinated. Amazon, Google and Apple acting together to shut down a platform that has been very clear about its stance on content moderation from the outset. Free speech is not just any value. Sooner or later you will find yourself on the side of an issue where your speech will be attacked. Then there is the always present double standard. Why did Twitter allow “Hang Mike Pence” to trend last night? Where are the suspensions and permanent bans? Again, sooner or later we will all find ourselves on the other side of the double standard.
  • sneak 6y ago
    Americans seem to feel much the same way about censorship these days as they do about their own personal privacy: "It doesn't affect me or my life/views presently, so I don't see a reason to object to it." - The "I have nothing to hide" sort of thing.
    • rmrfstar 6y ago
      Most Americans are actively hostile to privacy, not just ambivalent. If you tell them, "Alice doesn't carry a cellphone, because she thinks it shares her real time location with advertisers, hedge funds, private investigators, debt collectors, bounty hunters, and the government," most will conclude that (a) Alice is mentally ill, or (b) Alice is a degenerate criminal. Either way, Alice needs to be investigated. That means the state needs to interview her colleagues and neighbors, and subpoena her bank and medical records.
      • sneak 6y ago
        I don't believe that this is true.
        • deleted 6y ago
          [deleted]
  • Someone 6y ago
• bigshell 6y ago
  I'm not particularly fond of this. It's censorship. Parler wasn't doing anything illegal and Amazon had no legal reason to kick them off. I worry for the future. While I don't think the loss of parler is massive this is getting the censorship ball rolling.
  • 0xB31B1B 6y ago
    Parker was being used to promote and organize 2 more riots on the 19th and 20th in the exact same manner it was used to promote and organize the Jan 6 riot that ended in 5 deaths. Also, sedition, what was being planned and organized on parler, is a federal crime, it’s in the criminal code.
    • adamsvystun 6y ago
      Internet was being used to promote and organize 2 more riots on the 19th and 20th in the exact same manner it was used to promote and organize the Jan 6 riot that ended in 5 deaths. Also, sedition, what was being planned and organized on parler, is a federal crime, it’s in the criminal code. Not saying that Parler shouldn't have been banned, just that this particular argument is weak.
      • temporalparts 6y ago
        Legal arguments aside. If you believe strongly that your platform is used to organize something in two weeks that will result in the death of innocent people and you believe strongly that you can just flip a switch to prevent that, would you?
        • rvn1045 6y ago
          In that case I would do a temporary ban for a limited time and not a permanent one.
      • erikpukinskis 6y ago
        Irrelevant, "Internet" is not an AWS customer.
• cptnapalm 6y ago
  I'm leaning towards thinking that what happened on the 6th was, to some extent, blowback. There has been an extraordinary amount of violence over the last few years which has been ignored, rationalized, justified, and even labeled, in an Orwellian way, "peaceful". This did not gone unnoticed. There were other relevant circumstances, but I think blowback is certainly a large portion of it.
• AHappyCamper 6y ago
  This is a terrible idea. It says that "you don't need to break the law to be punished". This give the big tech companies quasi judicial powers where the grounds for punishments are arbitrary and subjective. Only the courts should be able to decide this type of thing, and I hope Parler sues Apple, Google, and especially Amazon for billions of dollars. What if tomorrow they decide to ban and de-platform an app with 5 million users because they didn't like the color scheme the app was using (or their rising stock price...)? It opens the dangerous door to anti-competitive behavior. Today it's Parler, and tomorrow it will be you. This is a double edged sword that will cut everyone besides the big tech companies. We must not allow this action to go unchallenged.
  • pldr2244 6y ago
    What is tomorrow I decide to build a new social app that becomes a blockbuster - and then a minority group that hates the caste I come from, wants to promote their anti-my-caste views there? Am I going to be obligated to allow them to do so? Or is it my private property right to say that I am not compelled to publish your hateful perspectives or views, thank you very much?
  • detaro 6y ago
    How is "companies stop doing business with other companies they don't think it's in their interest doing business with" a new thing that now the door is being opened for? It's happening all the time, and the right to do so is reserved in pretty much any terms of service document ever. It's truly weird how some seem to now see this as some new development one suddenly has to worry about.
    • AHappyCamper 6y ago
      No, you are so totally wrong. When I want to book an appointment with my doctor, I use an app hosted on Amazon. When I am in lockdown and I want to ask a friend to bring me food, I use WhatApp. When I need to request a tax refund, I use the Tax Dept app that is hosted on Google Cloud. These are not companies anymore - they are critical civil infrastructure. If you don't believe me, just try not using any of them for a month. Imagine if the water company shuts off all service to your house and there is no alternative. They are a private company - should they have no responsibility to give you water or sewage. Such a narrow view...
• nec4b 6y ago
  Can we now also expect oil companies (supposedly republican controlled) to stop supplying oil to companies stifling free speech?
• sh1989 6y ago
  Good riddance
• babesh 6y ago
  Media wants to tell you how to think. Now it wants to take on the power to silence voices that run counter to its messaging. This is the case irrespective of whether there were incitement to violence.
• WhoCaresLies 6y ago
  and they want to make you believe that Signal is the answser, why wouldn't they ban Signal too, people use it to sell drugs
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• nec4b 6y ago
  Censors are never worried about lies, the truth is what bothers them.
• satysin 6y ago
  This needs to happen. Parler is not a "social network" in the same way Twitter, Facebook or Reddit are. It is a radicalisation platform hiding behind a Silicon Valley style startup veneer. I signed up for Parler 6 weeks ago and what I have seen from the platform is frightening. It isn't dumb memes and gifs but hardcore alt-right propaganda and conspiracy theories. Within hours of commenting on posts I was contacted about joining groups of "like minded patriots" (their actual words). This lead to Telegram and Discord servers dedicated to "their cause". These places are highly organised. Unique URLs with multiple 'decoy and delay' steps to find and remove people from sharing links with authorities for example. They have detailed (probably some of the best tbh) guides on signing up for secure services like Protonmail for email, installing Tor and Tails to access Onion services (this leads to a whole other world of horrors), how to use Bitcoin to purchase what are essentially burner SIM cards and phones to sign up to other services, and advice on how to recruit your friends and family such as conversation topics and “gotcha” responses, manipulated media to share, psychological and emotional manipulation techniques, etc. The techniques used are no different to what we have seen from groups like ISIS/ISIL over the past decade. I support free speech but this goes beyond that IMHO. This isn't strongly disagreeing with government policies but clearly talking about murdering those they believe are wrong. I have seen people seriously talking about kidnapping and murdering politicians. Posting photos of their weapons. Sharing detailed instructions on homemade chemical weapons and IEDs from people who clearly have military knowledge of such things. When ISIS was releasing daily videos of horrific murders everyone called for such recruitment platforms to be shut down. It wasn't a matter of free speech then and it isn't now. The only difference is that these are (mostly) white American and European people not brown people from the middle east. The message and methodologies used are the same though. Parler is without question a platform for radicalisation and recruitment for "western jihad" as I have seen people un-ironically use. It needs to go and I fully support Amazon, Apple, Google and whoever else in shutting them down.
• randomsearch 6y ago
  I always think about publishing in these circumstances. In the UK you can't just write anything you want and publish it in a book. I can't just make something up about someone in a book. There are also laws I can't break about inciting violence. Etctera. I don't see this as much about the individual's right to free speech as about the platform's ability to monetise published content, which is what Twitter and Facebook are doing. When you view things through this prism, I think it's simpler. Either the platforms conform to the law as a book publisher must, which makes it hard for a real-time _broadcast_ platform to exist, or the platform does not exist at all. This exposes the social media platforms as another instance of the same pattern as Uber or Airbnb, in that they are publishing platforms that simply ignore the law. Before you shoot me down here: I agree that being able to share with your friends is not the same as publishing. It's the features that turn the medium from sharing with friends into a broadcast medium that have made the social media companies (reckless) publishers. I'd like to see an end to the broadcast features, as companies are unlikely to change.
• itsthefnlacctdn 6y ago
  If I was still an edgy teen(surprised Im not are you), Id be actively looking to join the banned groups. I'm worried that these edge places wont have many voices of reason left to turn them away. This will further radicalize. I was curious, how does twitter deal with the real terrorist groups? Isis and Al Q were big til not long ago. -Understanding the network of pro-ISIS Twitter accounts can help uncover who the primary actors are, how content propagates through the network, and improve the monitoring of ISIS activities. We are just allowing more horrible stuff to happen in a few years down the line. I thought this freedom of speech was ingrained into this culture - I guess only ideally not practically.
• RegWEn 6y ago
  This is more like adding fuel to the fire than fighting it. As a European I dont see how this will help.
• PIKAL 6y ago
  Today the infrastructure for serving information over the internet is privately owned, and liberals say that it’s ok for private companies to censor people on their platforms, and they are right. Tomorrow, the internet will be a public utility, the infrastructure will be publicly owned and conveying information over the internet will be universally appreciated as the way that communication between people is done — to be cut off from it would be like having your tongue cut out. The only difference between today and tomorrow is a few strokes of legislative pens — nothing, basically. The argument that this is ok because it’s private companies is a cop out.
  • jackson1442 6y ago
    Internet infrastructure was actually built with a lot of public money and the internet is already accepted as the way that communication between people is done. You’re a little late with this comment, I’m afraid. If the internet were publicly owned, wouldn’t it actually be _considerably harder_ to cut someone off from it because of the government’s responsibility to ensure equitable access to utilities (like you propose the internet will become)?
    • PIKAL 6y ago
      I think you misread my comment.
• truthwhisperer 6y ago
  So the rule of law does not exist anymore? They have apparantly their own court. I would be afraid if i were a competitor to one of these.
• Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago
  I see a lot of people here saying, "protecting free speech is important, but ... " citing a long list of exceptions for really ugly things. You don't get it. Free speech isn't about protecting viewpoints that you like or find acceptable. It's about protecting ALL speech, especially including the one that you don't like. Yes. Even incitement of violence, genocide, etc. In a society where all speech is permitted, extremist viewpoints will be naturally marginalized and lose power.
• adamsvystun 6y ago
  The fact that Parler did not anticipate this is crazy. How do you decide to build Parler and than tie yourself to AWS?
• franczesko 6y ago
  This creates a very dangerous precedent. Who is responsible for the published content then? Individuals or the whole platforms? It clearly shows that big tech has too much of power without any kind of overlook, procedures and right to appeal.
• mensetmanusman 6y ago
  In China, the Hong Kong protestors are also banned from using social media because they were inciting violence.
• secondcoming 6y ago
  The AWS censorship should be concerning for anyone who uses their services. It's now clear that any business you have can be destroyed by a small, but vocal, group of people who don't like it for whatever reason. What does this 'cut off' look like? Do AWS make your site inaccessible to the public, but still give you access to your data? Do they waive the data egress fees so that you can pull everything down locally?
• irthomasthomas 6y ago
  I'm in the U.K. and I need some help understanding what is happening here. I'm a big left winger too, (but British socialism respects the sovereignty of parliament. Or it used to). Anyway, why can I not install this app now? I checked and it is not in the U.K. play store. Your president did something bad, and now I am not allowed some app? And the president and his supporters have been wiped from social media? I can't even go and see what the did to cause this?
• jonplackett 6y ago
  Better late than never
• flippinburgers 6y ago
  Given that there have been BLM protests for months, do we actually have reason to believe that if Trump had won the extreme left would not have been talking about performing similar disruptive actions? How then would these companies have reacted?
• itsoktocry 6y ago
  Well, I can't read through 3000 comments, but I'll say here I'm surprised at the naivete I've read about this incident. These companies didn't wake up yesterday morning and decide Parler was "bad". There's been a power shift in Washington, and they are trying to signal to the new people in power "We're on your side, we'll listen! No need to regulate us!" That's the real problem here - there's more to this than a private company deciding who is on their platform, which is their prerogative. There is implicit (and explicit) political pressure to do so. That's what is scary and, in my opinion, wrong. And it isn't a left-right thing. I'm sure the Republicans are looking at this and getting the same message, and would be just as happy to use the same tools.
• samizdis 6y ago
  The Economist has published an article [1] that discusses what it sees as increasing scrutiny of social media networks. In one paragraph, it says: ... it is hard to avoid the sense that the social-media firms have reached a point of no return. Disquiet about the power and reach of social media is not confined to political partisans. Britain, Australia, Singapore, Brazil and the EU have passed, or are mooting, new rules designed to regulate social media. The banning of the world’s most powerful politician will raise the temperature even further. The firms’ in-house enforcement policies—which are spotty and inconsistently applied—will come under even more intense scrutiny. I found the article to be well-reasoned and thoughtful, so am posting it here because I think that it might be of interest to other HN users. [1] https://www.economist.com/international/2021/01/10/the-expulsion-of-donald-trump-marks-a-watershed-for-facebook-and-twitter https://www.economist.com/international/2021/01/10/the-expul...
• concordDance 6y ago
  Annoyingly, the main reason Parler (and similar services) became so extreme was because the mainstream communities, organizations and platforms kept censoring conservative thought and thus driving them elsewhere. Then you end up with an echo chamber formed partially around the dislike of an outgroup... Radicalization inevitably follows. If people and institutions had just been more tolerant about allowing conservatives to make themselves heard the polarization and alternative reality could have been avoided (as conservatives would have been much more exposed to non-conservative ideas and counterarguments rather than entering a purity spiral. The opposite direction purity spirals of the american right and left are scary). Banning Parler is just a bandaid, the end of this route is the banning of uncensored and unmonitored communication between people.
  • dragonwriter 6y ago
    > Annoyingly, the main reason Parler (and similar services) became so extreme was because the mainstream communities, organizations and platforms kept censoring conservative thought and thus driving them elsewhere. I would argue the opposite: the reason those sites became so extreme is that the mainstream sites restrict so little but the very extreme, that the population looking to escape the mainstream sites is very extreme.
• king_panic 6y ago
  Free speech is a lot harder to defend when you disagree with what's said. It's relinquished by moralistic rationalizations and righteous condemnations... Be careful what you wish for.
• wisty 6y ago
  I could try to explain how banning the right (starting with the extremists and now including the POTUS and presumably about 20% of the USA) would just push them into the online equivalent of desert training camps. But why bother? People will just say "That's their fault". This is not a smart way to discuss policy, but I fully expect that this is what it will degenerate into. "Banning them drives them underground where they can be radicalised by the actual nazis!" That's their fault. End of story, we can all rest easy knowing that if the policy is counterproductive, we meant well (everyone thinks they mean well) and someone else is really to blame.
  • watwut 6y ago
    I dont see how the militias who brought bombs to capitol or planned execution of governor could be radicalized further. I am also in uneasy when these are equated with general right wing. Yes, contemporary right wing is generally enabling them at best, but I still see it better if right wing wont become synonym with armed attackers groups.
• boringg 6y ago
  Side stepping the free speech issue, they should have let Parler die on its own accord because it’s such a garbage app.
• JaimeThompson 6y ago
  I do find it interesting that some of those who think that medical professional should have a right to refuse lifesaving medial care to people for "moral reasons" are also up in arms about this happening.
• thefounder 6y ago
  Walled gardens working as planned! "Cloud" as well! Enjoy!
• deleted 6y ago
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• sadfev 6y ago
  I think this should incentivize people to build their own backend and definitely move off big tech cloud. I know it’s more expensive but it was routine in 90s and 00s
• nautilus12 6y ago
  Is anyone else suspicious of the fact that Twitter is using AWS and has teamed up with AWS? Could there be a paper trail there? This could be an example of 2nd degree anti-competitive behavior.
• fasteddie31003 6y ago
  How is this not collusion? https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/collusion.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/collusion.asp
• jlkuester7 6y ago
  From an engineering standpoint, this is definitely a cautionary tale about why you should be worried about vendor lock-in. If you don't own/maintain your entire deployment stack (right down to the bare-metal servers that your code is running on) you need to have some kind of plan for being able to migrate to a new vendor (whether because of a TOS violation or just the original vendor shuts down). I don't know the technical details of the Parlor setup, but depending on how integrated they were with the AWS ecosystem, (e.g. using Lambda executors instead of just running services on EC2) moving off of AWS could mean huge changes to their architecture.... That being said, even in the best case scenario this kind of migration would be very expensive (S3 data egress fees??) and a 24 hour timeline seems absurd! Can anyone with experience in this area speak to if this kind of accelerated timeline is normal when it comes to web-hosting TOS violations? I just cannot imagine signing a contract with a hosting company that would allow them to unilaterally cancel my service with only 24 hours notice. (Admittedly, the NYT article references prior communication between Parlor and Amazon, so this is obviously not totally out-of-the-blue. Still, 24 hours from the final decision to account-deactivation seems insane for an enterprise offering.... (To be clear, I am not trying to argue for or against Amazon's decision to drop Parlor's account. I am just shocked that their AWS contract allows such a limited migration window for something like a TOS violation.)
  • akvadrako 6y ago
    Owning your own hardware if not enough; if it was that easy it wouldn't be a big deal. You still need access to the network, meaning people who are willing to peer with you. It'll be a big problem if a major player says "we'll cut you off if you peer with Parlor, directly or indirectly". You also need access to domain names, payment providers, maybe advertising networks.
    • jlkuester7 6y ago
      True! This is why I am interested in de-centralized solutions to some of these challenges. - Social networks: https://joinmastodon.org/ https://joinmastodon.org/ - DNS: https://handshake.org/ https://handshake.org/ - Payment Providers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptocurrency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptocurrency (To be clear, it is not that I want to ensure that idiots always have a platform to spew their idiocy, but I would prefer that the decision on who is an idiot be distributed and not centralized.)
• xnx 6y ago
  3000+ comments and I don't think I've seen the relevant XKCD? https://xkcd.com/1357/ https://xkcd.com/1357/
• whoknew1122 6y ago
  As an AWS employee: Good. It's about time. Before the 6th, everyone was just acting like far-right seditionists and accelerationists were bumbling fools LARPING around. After the 6th, it's become clear that the LARPs are actually serious. It's time we take them serious. Does Parler have the right to exist on the internet? Yeah. But it doesn't have a right to use other peoples' infrastructure to exist. AWS was complicit until now. There's still work to be done regarding what AWS enables, but there's one less thing AWS is complicit in.
  • ed25519FUUU 6y ago
    Out of curiosity, what are your thoughts regarding antifa’s actions in Portland and the BLM protests earlier in the year? Would you have any problem with AWS hosting their services and helping them organize? I’m asking this question in good faith because I’m having a hard time separating the protest on Jan 6th from basically any other protest I saw last summer, including in DC.
    • whoknew1122 6y ago
      I'm not going to even pretend this is a good-faith question. Protests in Portland and other places led to mostly property damage. There were a few deaths, and that sucks. But it wasn't uniformly violence coming from antifa. And the protests were in support of racial and social justice. On the other hand we witnessed the following on the 6th (among too many other things to mention): 1.) A literal gallows erected on Capitol Hill 2.) Thousands of people entering secured areas of a government building. 3.) A police officer literally beat to death with a fire extinguisher This was all in an attempt to overthrow a democratic election. These were insurrectionists intent on using domestic terrorism to overthrow the American government and the concept of American democracy itself. --- That is to say, what we witnessed with BLM protests is completely and diametrically opposite to what we witnessed with the so-called Patriot movement on the 6th. I have absolutely no problem with social justice advocates using AWS as a platform. I do have a problem with domestic terrorists and their enablers using AWS as a platform.
      • 6y ago
• pfdietz 6y ago
  They pretty much have to do this, due to risk from 18 U.S. Code § 2383 - Rebellion or insurrection.
• deleted 6y ago
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• intrasight 6y ago
  I don't much like the use of the term "de-platforming". It is too broad, and doesn't capture the nuances of this. The free internet is the only "platform" that you have any chance to control. It's not perfect, but it's the only one we have (there's also amateur radio). If you want a platform, get a co-located web server in a jurisdiction that won't unplug you due to your views.
• diavelguru 6y ago
  Looking at the TOS of these companies, they are within their legal right to offer service or not. No shoes, no shirt, no service.
• luxuryballs 6y ago
  This made me go check out Parler and one thing I will say is that you can tell the algorithms are more raw/organic based on the experience. Twitter is so overly sculpted that it becomes rather dull and predictable, almost manipulative.
• eecks 6y ago
  Apple and Google are now the thought police... great.
• dmje 6y ago
  The problem is that "free speech" is too often conflated with "being able to say whatever the hell I want, however horrific it is". In my humble opinion, a democracy is one in which free speech is championed, but ultimately this freedom is trumped (genuinely no pun intended...) by the ability of the individual or group to actually rationally talk, accept difference and rationalise their point of view. My liberty to say "the earth is flat" or "Covid19 doesn't exist" is not "free speech" but lunacy. I have zero rational evidence to support these positions, and I'd be unable in the face of serious scrutiny to even try to support these. Science is a great example of a method which actually works. The whole, entire point of the scientific method is that it is based around being right until it is proved wrong. Every single serious academic ever knows this: they publish a paper with a theory, and they pretty much literally ask their community to shoot it down. Sometimes the theories remain for decades, sometimes they're found to be wrong immediately, and then a new paper and theory is published which sets out the latest position, there again until it is proved wrong. The interesting thing in almost all the examples being pored over right now - Twitter and Trump, Parler, Voat - is that the individuals concerned are actually all involved in an echo chamber which self-supports. They are completely unable to rationalise, and if you ever tried jumping onto any of these streams or platforms and providing an alternative point of view then you'll see exactly what I mean by this - you're almost immediately flamed out of the room. The irony here - that these "free speech" platforms are the least able to support any kind of dissenting opinion - is intense. Ultimately, the person claiming the primacy of "free speech" needs to accept that this freedom has a price: they need to be able to defend their position, and accept that others have alternative positions, and accept that even if their position is "true" now, it may not be "true" when further evidence emerges. This is rarely, I would suggest never, the case in the examples provided here. In terms of this specific thread: I don't see Parler as a "platform of free speech". I see it as "a self-supporting echo chamber of individuals who are completely against free speech".
• nojvek 6y ago
  I visited thedonald.win and Parler. It was a bit scary. There were many many mentions of killing Mike Pence & Nancy pelosi. We ought to remember that in the Capitol they found hidden IED pipe bombs. They were not afraid to kill public figures as was the intent online. The sweeping reactions is because what was said online actually panned out. If this was predominantly Muslim or black community instead of Trump supporters, it would have been a much bigger uproar.
• bitwize 6y ago
  The network interprets fash as noise and filters it out. If you are a hardliner about free speech, you are fash. If you are conservative, you are fash-proximate.
• no-s 6y ago
  I made some comments earlier, and after receiving some noxious pushback I paused for reflection. Now I'm feeling very uneasy about this (not yet posting from a throwaway, heheh). It is my feeling the combined action to de-platform Trump including de-platforming Parler is foolish and very likely to escalate the tensions, not defuse them, e.g. increase the likelihood of Bad Things Happening That I Won't Explicitly Detail Because I Don't Want To Be De-Platformed For Writing About Stuff That Should Perfectly Obvious To People That Pay Attention To History. Millions of people were moving onto Parler because TheDonald and a number of well known commentators told them to go there to avoid censorship. Subsequent to shutting Trump out of public social media over what could understandably be construed as a bogus rationale of censorship (especially if one believes the elections were fraudulent), BigTechBogeyPersons collude to shut everyone out of Trump's replacement platform, (and potentially any future option). That's what literally millions of American people perceive. My messaging is buzzing with non-tech people who are afraid the apocalypse is now and asking me what to do, what's going to happen, etc. People are asking me what to do about it! The blowback potential is off the charts. The chilling effect is over the top. There's plenty of American people personally affected. They are frightened and/or outraged by this outcome. Plenty of people who immigrated to the US from non-free countries have drawn conclusions from this that are quite different from the virtuous and self-righteous moralizing I see commonly proposed here on HN and by "acceptable" social media sources. The commenter who suggested this would be perceived as a "casus belli" probably hit the nail on the head.
• brokenkebab 6y ago
  Silencing other side means you claim power over them, put them below you. And if you believe that's way away from polarization, and violence - I have very bad news for you.
• tlear 6y ago
  There is a massive business opportunity here. Funny enough Gab is probably best positioned to take advantage of it. It has been deplatformed years ago and survived by basically building whole stack from scratch. There were many many many millions of American citizens who voted from Trump. None of this changing any minds. At this point for purposes of political speech Twitter, FB, Amazon have decided to abandon almost half of US market. If you think that chunk of the market will remain underserved you deluding yourself.
• mesozoic 6y ago
  Very bad business move for AWS. Now every company has to seriously consider hosting on multiple clouds as AWS kicking them off becomes an existential risk.
• OnlyRepliesToBS 6y ago
  what is happening
• Bibitcoe 6y ago
  It's great to have an Amazon card... :-)
• Bibitcoe 6y ago
  It's great to have an Amazon card ...
• swiley 6y ago
  Regardless of how you feel about free speech: Apple and Google being able to dictate what software is popular/acceptable/usable and what software is not is 100% not ok. Dump your smartphone or if you must have one use a pinephone.
• Fellshard 6y ago
  One angle for concern: this means only big, established companies with their own infrastructure will be able to stay up while hosting calls for violence. Anyone hosted in the cloud is now responsible for their own censorship, massively raising minimum cost for competition.
• webXL 6y ago
  This is a sad day for free speech.
• carlhjerpe 6y ago
  I think It's interesting that noone here is talking about how important it is not to fall for vendor lockin. If Parler is using a lot of Amazon specific things they'll have a hard time migrating this fast. We need to use opensource and available technologies to run our software. (I completely dismiss the political argument here to talk about the fact that we're at the mercy of some companies for our own existence)
• dmingod666 6y ago
  This is political and that's fine. Just remember, if your side is winning doesn't mean it won't happen in the other direction for exactly the same political reasons. Anyways, I don't care either way about the American clown show.
• kristrump 6y ago
  I think ignorat black people are more reliant on easy to use platforms because white people are smart enough to use any platform, simple to complexed . Your obviously a racist person.
• kristrump 6y ago
  I will no longer do business with amozon apple or google .
• kristrump 6y ago
  I think ignorant black people are more reliant on easy to use platforms because white people are smart enough to use any platform, simple to complexed . Your obviously a racist person.