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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 m

• 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.
      • tptacek 6y ago
        When the leftists guillotine someone, this will become a more persuasive argument.
        • verwyrelevant 6y ago
          Isn't the whole point of this "deplatforming" to stop incitement?
          • tptacek 6y ago
            Yes, after concrete evidence that the incitement is sincere, or being materially interpreted as sincere. (For the record: I think the guillotine imagery is as offensive as the Pinochet helicopter stuff, which is to say, extraordinarily offensive, and I think less of anyone who uses it. That's easy for me to say though, because I'm also not a leftist.).
        • adolph 6y ago
          Ironically https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2020/08/jeff-bezos-guillotine-protest-amazon-workers https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2020/08/jeff-bezos-guilloti...
        • 1MachineElf 6y ago
          Dispite my disagreeing with you and feeling pretty shafted by the removal of Parler, don't take it personally - you're an open source contributer who has earned my respect.
      • acdha 6y ago
        Did they name people, places, or times? A key factor in free speech legal cases is how credibly threatening something is — someone telling a friend “I’m going to strangle you!” after they get rickrolled is clearly not but someone saying “On <date>, we’re going to <place> to kill <politician>” is enough that the Secret Service might want to talk with you. Another factor is the climate: nobody is using guillotines anywhere now but mass shootings are sadly common.
    • nostromo 6y ago
      > You can quite easily use mainstream social media as long as you aren't posting about how someone should be beheaded. https://thehill.com/sites/default/files/blogs/kathygriffintweet.jpg https://thehill.com/sites/default/files/blogs/kathygriffintw...
      • tptacek 6y ago
        Literally no person in the entire world believed this was an appeal for people to behead Donald Trump.
        • deleted 6y ago
          [deleted]
        • gfodor 6y ago
          You’re a lot smarter than this, so my reaction to this is wondering why you would say this.
          • tptacek 6y ago
            Say more? I'm being sincere.
            • gfodor 6y ago
              There is absolutely no way you can be certain of the beliefs of the whole world in response to something. It’s hard enough to even feel confident you truly know the beliefs of a single person. That alone is true, but this imagery itself is so grotesque that we ought to assume it led to a change in the degree of motive to cause harm. If you don’t believe me, consider a thought exercise where the identity of the person involved is exchanged with someone who did end up assassinated this way. Would it be reasonable to conclude this influenced it?
              • tptacek 6y ago
                That doesn't seem at all plausible to me. Further, I don't think you can point to lots of serious "behead Trump" chatter in the opposition; conversely, I can easily point you to "hang Pence from the tree outside the Capitol" postings that were not kidding. Anyways, we probably understand each other at this point and don't need to belabor this, even if we don't agree with each other.
  • DJPocari 6y ago
    I agree that Parler should be shut down, but going forward I think we need to rely on court systems with due process (or some new alternative system that specifically addresses digital censorship). I’m afraid of this becoming the norm. Public discourse increasingly relies on these corporate platforms. I don’t think everyone quite understands the implications of normalizing this behavior, and to me that’s frightening.
    • tptacek 6y ago
      For the record: I don't know if "shut down" is the optimal outcome. Credible moderation --- "no appeals to violence" --- would take it from dangerous to mere odiousness. But I don't know that anyone has a right to demand any private business host odious content, either. But it's Parler's problem that they've hit this point with so little time to build credible moderation, not anybody else's. Me sowing, me reaping, &c &c.
      • TylerE 6y ago
        Do you really expect "credible moderation" given that giving the RWNJ's a home is their stated business plan? (And no - it isn't free speech, they're quite happy to ban non-conservatives)
        • tptacek 6y ago
          I don't, but I'm just saying it could be done.
    • UnpossibleJim 6y ago
      To be clear, it isn't being shut down. A private company has chosen not to host it on its servers. They can invest in servers and host it themselves, if they so choose. It may seem like splitting hairs, but it is an important distinction to make.
      • DJPocari 6y ago
        Sure that's possible, but what if their domain registrar disables their domain name? What if Verizon limits web traffic to and from the website? The idea that that could happen used to be far fetched, but now I wouldn't be surprised.
  • tidepod12 6y ago
    I fully agree but it's getting increasingly hard to make this argument with a straight face given that the tech companies in question still host numerous other hate groups. Twitter still allows the leaders of the Taliban and the Nation of Islam to post. It's clear that the "line" we're talking about is arbitrarily set for different groups based on some unknown criteria, and that IMO is part of the problem.
    • michaericalribo 6y ago
      I think the criterion is pretty clear: this stopped being a matter of speech or rhetoric, and started being a matter of real-world violence and unrest. For the record, I think all extremists should be banned, including the Taliban and Iran.
      • tidepod12 6y ago
        Because the Taliban doesn't commit acts of real-world violence and unrest...?
        • mbreese 6y ago
          I'm guessing it's because they don't advertise^ plans for violence in public... or on Twitter. Edit: ^specific plans
          • tidepod12 6y ago
            https://twitter.com/Zabehulah_M33/status/1346373559812300800 https://twitter.com/Zabehulah_M33/status/1346373559812300800 This is the official spokesman of the Taliban posting a propaganda video of a militant bragging about waging jihad. https://twitter.com/Zabehulah_M33/status/1343458261459218432 https://twitter.com/Zabehulah_M33/status/1343458261459218432 This is another video (and also see part2 of the tweet, which is posted as a reply to this one) where militants holding guns talk about their plan to kill the government leaders of Afghanistan.
            • deleted 6y ago
  • beervirus 6y ago
    Parler is also full of people who aren’t plotting assassinations. And there are plenty of terrorists on Twitter too, but nobody wants to talk about that.
    • briantakita 6y ago
      There's state sanctioned violence & there's uncontrolled violence. Authorities don't like competition, especially when they are on the take.
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  • waffle_ss 6y ago
    So Signal and Telegram should be banned as well from all IaaS, app stores etc. as well since Islamic terrorists have been shown to use them?
  • amadeuspagel 6y ago
    The fundamental question is not whether the line should be drawn before or after parler, but who should draw the line, who should decide what kind of websites are allowed to exist. We don't allow electricity providers to decide what kind of businesses are allowed to exist, similarly we should not allow hosting providers to decide what kind of websites are allowed to exist.
  • paulnechifor 6y ago
    Then Twitter should be banned too because it's full of calls for political assassinations: https://twitter.com/hashtag/assassinatetrump https://twitter.com/hashtag/assassinatetrump
• Mtinie 6y ago
  How do you classify an “actual terrorist grouping site” versus a “collection of fringe political ideological groups who happens to have a lot of content which looks suspiciously like the same content you’d find on actual terrorist groups’ sites” without using a broad brush?
  • fatbird 6y ago
    It's called The Benghazi Line: if they've collectively caused more deaths (5) than occurred during the Benghazi Incident (4), then they're a legit threat requiring action to disrupt and deplatform. With less snark: it's not about how much organization they demonstrate, it's a judgement call about the likelihood of tangible damage and destruction occurring. Yes, it's an imprecise standard. That's the reality in which we live and operate.
  • AgentOrange1234 6y ago
    If you can’t tell the difference, does it matter?
    • Mtinie 6y ago
      To me, no. My question was to the author of the commentary I was replying...though, since I posted they’ve gone back and appended a note to their comment providing their definition.
• eropple 6y ago
  A line of "cannot police their userbase and prevent them from violently threatening other people on a regular basis" seems to pass the reasonable-person test to me. (To be clear: I think Mark Zuckerberg and the actors at Facebook who have not handled their fomented genocides on Facebook and WhatsApp belong in the Hague. I am not precious about them, either.)
  • Taniwha 6y ago
    It also passes the "shouting 'fire' in a crowded theater" test - IMHO the US government can clearly regulate this sort of dangerous speech
    • chasd00 6y ago
      Democrats in charge means dangerous speech is from the right. Republicans in charge means dangerous speech is from the left. they would continually declare opposition as the most dangerous of speech and pass/repeal laws accordingly. The supreme court wouldn't be able to keep up.
• lostcolony 6y ago
  Why does it feel more murky than that? There are actual threats being posted against lawmakers, and then we had a violent storming of the capital by those people, many of them armed, asking where those lawmakers are. I mean...that image alone. "Violence works. Make them afraid", accompanied with text then saying "How about make them hang?", and showing lawmakers hiding in the Capital. The fact it's a third party forum that these terrorist threats and planning are taking place doesn't really change the fact it's still facilitating terrorism.
  • briantakita 6y ago
    "violent storming of the capital"...I don't know where you are from but this was not violent. It's far less violent that your typical BLM/Antifa demonstration destroying peoples' livelihoods & definitely less violent than what the Cartels do to unfriendly politicians & journalists in Mexico. I get it, the political establishment controls the narrative & the politicians got scared (with hilarious photos) that the unwashed masses entered their hallowed halls in "The Peoples' Building", but this was not nearly as violent as the media has hyped this up to be. The idiots who "stormed the capital" are going to be arrested, shamed, etc. It's taken care of, there is no insurrection. This is a shot across the bow & I don't think it's wise to crack down & punish a large portion of the population. If you think this was bad, it could get much worse. Let's not make this worse...please.
  • DJPocari 6y ago
    But this isn't the same as ISIS recruiting off of Twitter where the FBI/CIA/NSA monitors that discourse and contacts the respective platforms. This is a company deciding what should and shouldn't be censored. There's a difference between protected speech and yelling "FIRE!" in a movie theater. But with the way things are moving, more and more speech is being classified as "hate speech." The line between offensive speech and violent words is getting more murky. I think there needs to be clear standards and clear enforcement.
    • lostcolony 6y ago
      'The line between offensive speech and violent words is getting more murky.' So do you think Amazon is falling on the wrong side of it here? Because even if it's more murky, if they're waiting until it's -very clearly violent-, egregiously so, with real physical criminal acts occurring because of it, I'm pretty sure no matter how murky the line is, they're well on the side of "violent words", not "offensive speech". Your concern only applies if they're trying to draw the line in an area that is murky. I'd contend this is not.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• arentyouspecial 6y ago
  Private companies are free to ‘censor’ what they believe is either bad for business or exposes them to liability. Maybe the free market has decided extremism is bad for business.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • DJPocari 6y ago
    The problem with the whole "free market" argument is that these companies don't abide by the same forces as traditional companies. If all my friends are on Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat, then I am forced to use those. Social media companies have quasi-monopolies and using alternatives is both difficult and impractical. Perhaps more decentralized communication networks will come about, but the government might use situations like this to shut them down or limit the legality of their use (as people cheer it on).
    • ip26 6y ago
      Social media companies have quasi-monopolies and using alternatives is both difficult and impractical. So did the press, and yet they were expressly granted this freedom. Buying a printing press and starting your own paper wasn't easy either, but the 1st amendment never said it was supposed to be.
    • supertrope 6y ago
      Big businesses will always have massive influence. Walmart refuses to stock AO rated computer games and NC17 movies. Advertisers don't want their ads running next to pornography. Corporate America supports gay rights (less some holdouts like Exxon). Some medium size cities in America only have have one newspaper left. I'm not concerned about social media network effects. MySpace and AOL used to be dominant services.
    • margaretdouglas 6y ago
      Convince your friends to change platform. If they won't, and it is such a foundational issue to you then perhaps you should either not worry about your social interactions being censored or find different friends. If my friends frequent a bowling alley I find questionable am I "forced" to partake because that is where my friends frequent? Your argument carries little weight to coerce such lax regulation. Tangentially, not terminating business with Parler could be construed as not operating in their shareholders best interest, a breach of their fiduciary duty, as it could potentially harm future business opportunities if they become associated with the platform. In this case AWS is not a utility that holds a monopoly on some resource. There is market competition, and hosting your own service is an option. If a telcom prevented the latter I'd agree with your argument, as there aren't necessarily alternate options. Even then the law outlines a framework where some content is illegal that any lawyer working for the firm could green flag for client/contract termination.
• aflag 6y ago
  None of that is technically censorship. They are all private companies and they have the prerogative to give the users a TOS, which they can accept or not. That said, I do think that having more options is always good, a decentralized Internet is a richer Internet.
  • mreome 6y ago
    Just a nit-pick, but the suppression of speech by a private institution is still censorship, it's just not government censorship. I think maybe you were conflating it with the First Amendment, which applies only to the government and it's agents and not private companies. In agreement with everything after your first sentence though.
    • aflag 6y ago
      Yes, it was a poor attempt of trying to explain the common misconception that the First Amendment applies to private business. You are correct, though, the word censorship is broader than that.
  • chasd00 6y ago
    are TOS required by law that if they are enforced then they are enforced equally? i doubt it but it seems like a contract violation to selectively enforce the TOS.
    • aflag 6y ago
      If you break the TOS, then the service provider can take any actions they are entitled to in the TOS at their discretion. You can challenge the validity of the TOS, but you can't force the service provider to be good or fast at enforcing their TOS.
• grumple 6y ago
  Corporations get to choose who they do business with, who’s on their platforms. If they don’t want to do business with a platform for hatred, violence, and fascism, they shouldn’t. Of course they should have done this 4 years ago...
• 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 so they are not exposed to racist parents? Where's the end to it? PS I came from Soviet Union and this is not a theoretical idea.
  • Igelau 6y ago
    > Why not to take kids away from the family and transfer them to the state so they are not exposed to racist parents? This isn't about racism. This is about a site that is unable/unwilling to stop itself from being a forum for inciting violence, terrorism, sedition, and treason.
    • mudil 6y ago
      So you think racism is not a threat to our nation? We'll send you to the re-education camp!
      • margaretdouglas 6y ago
        A private corporation is not the government, they can stop you from using their platform, not sending you to a "re-education camp".
        • mudil 6y ago
          I am talking about next step. We need to fight extremism.
  • chasd00 6y ago
    right, if the people on parler are such a threat surely CPS should be taking their kids into protective custody. does anyone know if that's happening?
• nodamage 6y ago
  Aren't all these things already regularly done in response to copyright violations, spam, child porn, etc? Seems like the precedent was set long ago. > Obviously actual terrorist group sites can and should be taken down, but this feels more murky than that. Considering the perpetrators of Wednesday's attack had guns and bombs[1] and declared their intent to kill US political leaders... what exactly distinguishes them from "actual terrorist groups"? [1] https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/08/politics/us-capitol-riots-arrest-pelosi-desk/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/08/politics/us-capitol-riots-arr...
  • adolph 6y ago
    The article says somebody parked 2 blocks away and left bombs and guns in their truck. Doesn’t that make you think the perps did not have guns and bombs while they were perpetrating?
    • nodamage 6y ago
      Just because he was arrested before he could use any of those items doesn't change the fact that violence was intended. Pipe bombs were also planted at the RNC and DNC headquarters.
      • adolph 6y ago
        A bombastic bipartisan, eh?
        • nodamage 6y ago
          It seems like the goal was to distract the police and draw them away from the capitol building.
• geofft 6y ago
  For spam / malicious traffic / botnets, our answer to all of those is historically "Yes," and it's worked fine for the growth of the internet so far. It's of course much easier to get a lazy cloud host, registrar, or ISP to take someone offline if the FBI is involved and gets a court order, but it's always been the expectation that there's an abuse contact who will respond to reports from the general public. Every domain or netblock entry in WHOIS has an abuse contact, implying there's some consensus standard of "abuse."
• barbacoa 6y ago
  As we have discovered, the sad answer to all those questions seems be be. "Yes when it agrees with my political agenda"
• wonnage 6y ago
  I see it more as a bunch of disparate entities all deciding Parler are a bunch of assholes and not doing business with them. Nobody's forcing their hand. Also, you drew the line at actual terrorist group sites, and I think Parler is one of those. It doesn't matter if you agree or not, enough people at AWS (and other corps) agreed with me and took it down. Sucks to be a minority, huh? As far as whether giant corps should be censoring content, it's nothing new. The fantasy of everybody running as an independent node of a distributed network is just that. Look how centralized Bitcoin has gotten.
• tyfon 6y ago
  The obvious line is incitement of violence. Most countries have codified this in law but the US has not I think?
  • chasd00 6y ago
    can you define incitement of violence? is there an actual definition or is it a "I know it when I see it" type thing? also, incitement or not isn't the perpetrator of violence the guilty one? ... or has that changed?
    • vladTheInhaler 6y ago
      It depends on the collective judgment of the attorneys working at the Department of Justice, and the judges hearing the case. Unfortunately, the DoJ is currently under the command of a person who has a vested interest in protecting "his" people, so attention to this issue has been lacking.
    • amanaplanacanal 6y ago
      If you hire a hitman, both you and the hitman are guilty. I think the same standard could apply here.
    • tyfon 6y ago
      > can you define incitement of violence? No, I'm no lawyer but there is a lot of legal precedent for this, at least in my country. This and hate speech against groups are the only limitation on free speech where I live.
• madeofpalk 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 more murky than that. No, it doesnt. Actual terrorist group sites should be banned and kicked of whatever platforms they're operating on. No one, or no company, should be required to provide service to them. I really struggle to see the issue here. If you allow calls for elected officials, or anyone, to be publically murdered, then it's free game for companys to refuse your service. It's pretty fucking simple imho.
  • mynameishere 6y ago
    The issue [sigh] is that anything you want to call terrorism is terrorism. To me, the BLM movement had every quality of a terrorist movement--burning, looting, murdering, for months while demanding policy changes. That's textbook terrorism. But no one--absolutely no one--in the public sphere defined it that way. Nancy Pelosi literally kneeled before the BLM movement. I suspect a person won't call violent actors terrorists if one of two things are true: They are successful, or if you are on the same side. For BLM and the establishment, both conditions were met. For those on the right, just having Cletus post a comment, "Hang the bastards" is sufficient cause to destroy a company overnight.
    • SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
      The sufficient cause in this case was that Cletus went on to invade the Capitol, driving the entire Congress into hiding for hours, while demanding (literally - some people were chanting the exact phrase) "heads on pikes". If it were just an abstract speech issue, I'd absolutely oppose Amazon's actions here.
    • madeofpalk 6y ago
      BLM protesters were murdering for months? If "BLM people" were calling for murders in public in the same way these Capitol people have been, then absolutely they should be kicked off platforms. I don't think many would disagree with that.
• goldenshale 6y ago
  It's a free market as well as a land of free speech, so they can just find another hosting provider, or build their own servers. They can enable whatever kind of groups they choose, but that should in no way require other people or organizations to collaborate with them.
• tedmcory77 6y ago
  "Obviously actual terrorist group sites can and should be taken down, but this feels more murky than that." § 2384. According to the statutory definition of sedition, it is a crime for two or more people within the jurisdiction of the United States: ... To oppose by force the authority of the United States government; to prevent, hinder, or delay by force the execution of any law of the United States; or. Terrorists.
  • DJPocari 6y ago
    Okay, but the problem is that we aren't using the same systems that would be used to take down an ISIS website. Instead we are becoming increasingly reliant on corporate leaders defining where the line is drawn. There is no due process or appeals system; they are the prosecutor and the judge.
    • madeofpalk 6y ago
      I think it's fair to say that Facebook/Twitter/AWS/whatever has been more lenient in favor of these "Capitol people" and Trump than ISIS. Do you think Twitter would deliberate days/months/years to ban an ISIS account?
  • verwyrelevant 6y ago
    Those things are for judges to decide, not an Internet mob (or militant employees of Big Tech).
    • strgcmc 6y ago
      Actually businesses should and must decide these things for themselves. A lot of stores now enforce rules for customers to wear masks, without any legal mandate or ruling by courts that masks are mandatory. It's good business, because your other customers won't want to shop at your store if they don't feel safe in a pandemic. Likewise, tech companies have the right to decide what is good business for themselves. Hosting a platform where insurrection and violence is being organized, will turn off your other customers and your employees. Are we saying no to free markets and private enterprise getting to choose good business decisions for themselves now?
• mynameishere 6y ago
  They will never draw the line. Even at an extreme, after the bodies of their enemies are in mass graves, they will still need to control the historians for hundreds or thousands of years. Crazy? Ask an average person how many people died in the Holocaust and they will get the number about 6 million too low.
• hodgesrm 6y ago
  There's a legitimate debate to be had on these issues but the speech we're seeing from the Far Right is well over the line of protected speech. It's now advocating civil war. The consequences of allowing it to continue should be obvious to any reasonable person after the assault on the US Capitol on Jan 6. That was just the beginning.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
• nemo44x 6y ago
  I believe in property rights. The service is the property of the shareholders. They should be able to do what they want with their property so long as it isn’t breaking a law. This is why I can’t understand some conservatives having an issue with this. It is principled to anyone who believes in the private ownership of property that they can ban whoever they want. I also believe internet companies shouldn’t have special privileges. They should be responsible for anything illegal on their property they could reasonably be believed to know about. Especially so if the content is user generated and made public. Crowdsourcing should be a liability.
• briantakita 6y ago
  Paid platforms & the open internet is where this is going.
  • chasd00 6y ago
    i see social media going back to servers and fiber. peering their physical network like in the old days. who wants to risk their entire enterprise on the whims of a "platform" provider?
• rover0 6y ago
  Where do we draw the line on Infrastructure regulation? The network, the platform-provider, the platform? There is precedent for regulating the network. And Parler can run it's own server . I think there is enough competition in the platform space to allow platforms to regulate themselves.
  • margaretdouglas 6y ago
    AWS is not infrastructure. It is a service for which there is competition, as well as the option of rolling your own. Telcoms are infrastructure because generally there is not competition and you can't just run your own fiber.
• systematical 6y ago
  Seems like free speech was tolerated until it began threatening the republic to me. There are some interesting questions with the power of companies but those questions existed long before this. Uncharted territory.
• tonystubblebine 6y ago
  I’m drawing two lines. One is property rights. For each of your questions, is the person doing the “censoring” the owner of the product? If yes, then I’m morally fine with it. The second line, does the censoring make the product unusable to me? If yes, then I will stop using it.
  • tonystubblebine 6y ago
    Maybe that’s too extreme. I’m not above lobbying them if it’s a decision I don’t agree with. Lobbying could go as far as boycotting. But fundamentally I see my role as to be either a consumer or not.
• esoterica 6y ago
  > Where do we draw the line on how we censor the internet? If they are a private company and not a utility with a government granted monopoly then they can do what they want. So not okay for Verizon or the power company, but everyone else should be free to censor. It's their private property.
• avianlyric 6y ago
  > Where do we draw the line on how we censor the internet? Is this censorship? Looks to like someone saying they don’t want to host someone else’s crap. It would be a form of censorship if private companies were forced to host content they didn’t want to host. > 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. I think this is a completely different problem that stems from anti-competitive behaviour. If we’re unhappy with a few large companies acting as extra-judicial gatekeepers, then we should break them up and increase competition and diversity in the market. If they hold a natural monopoly, then we should make them utilities, and make it explicitly clear that government is controlling their behaviour, and concepts like the 1st amendment should apply to them. What we shouldn’t do is try to fix this problem by having governments force private companies to host certain content. For the same reason we don’t want governments forcing private individuals to express certain speech.
• shirakawasuna 6y ago
  Another view is about what services on the internet should be considered a commons, particularly as more interaction shifts to online rather than in-person spaces. Physical commons are regulated through local action and laws with some basis in democratic action. Online commons are generally near-absolute dictatorships run by a for-profit company where the only restrictions are minor government regulations that would make them liable for users' actions under certain circumstances. Otherwise, any commons can purge users for essentially any reason with no input from those using the commons. I won't suggest solutions to this at the moment other than to say there are more options that providing democratic power over existing private commons. There could be public online commons that are guaranteed to meet certain standards, for example, and for private spaces to not compete and subsume them. Though this is speaking vaguely - there are many potential discussions to have about what a public digital commons could look like.
• dagmx 6y ago
  Why is this not a terrorism site to you? It's been used to conduct a terrorist attack this week. It's being used to plan a terrorist attack in the coming days. The creators were given a chance to clean house and take measures. They haven't. So why is this not a terrorist platform in your mind? Is there a belief that Americans cannot be terrorists? Edit: you added a clarification that these are not official terrorist groups as classified by intelligence agencies. However white supremacists are considered to be significant terrorist threats by many agencies. (https://www.politico.com/news/2020/09/04/white-supremacists-terror-threat-dhs-409236 https://www.politico.com/news/2020/09/04/white-supremacists-...). Parler is a haven for unchecked white supremacy. Therefore it is reasonably classifiable as a terrorist site
• IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago
  “Slippery slope” is a logical fallacy. For reasons I can’t quite figure out, HN will crucify you for equating correlation with causation, but seems incredibly fond of this equally invalid mode of reasoning.
• mech422 6y ago
  Giant corporations bring all sorts of problems. However, I think the real question is, if you have qualms about them, why use them at all? There are alternatives. Generally, people use them because they want to reach the corps. audience, or want to use the corps. infrastructure because its 'easier' then building there own. If thats the case, you're basically saying you're 'okay' with them having all the rights the TOS grants them.
• azernik 6y ago
  The government designating terrorist groups is a bad yardstick, because US law enforcement can only designate foreign terrorist organizations.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• adrr 6y ago
  There’s is no line. AWS is a business. And one that caters to enterprise customers. Large enterprise customers don’t want to be cohosted with sites that are controversial. AWS has a history of kicking off controversial sites.
• PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
  At some physical level (e.g. the backbone), I'd like to see laws that apply the 1st amendment to all US-controlled physical connectivity i.e. backbone operators cannot block traffic based on content, ever. Above that, I'd prefer to see a more diverse business ecosystem so that AWS' business policies were just one of a larger set of possible choices you would have when picking a hosting solution (note: this doesn't just mean more companies, it means greater diversity of the AUPs on offer) At that point, we could all do what I consider to be the right thing, and leave AWS or whoever to do whatever they want, confident that there were genuine alternatives available.
• cjohnson318 6y ago
  People get hung up on whether a group is an officially recognized terrorist organization or not, as if a group needs to be labeled terrorists by a three letter government agency before they can terrorize people, throw bricks through windows, burn down churches, ransack capitols, kidnap governors, lynch people, etc. It's a meaningless distinction whether or not they are officially recognized as a terrorists by the government.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]