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The short term calculus seems pretty clear: if a service is unable to moderate conversations that are inciting and planning imminent violence that undermines th

by 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...
      - bra-ket 6y ago
        That can be very convenient if you want to silence opposition. Just use an “incitement” clause indiscriminately for the entire conservative platform. There’s lots of incitement of violence on Twitter but no one cancels/de-platforms Twitter.
        eropple 6y ago
        Twitter has a professional moderation staff dealing with many orders of magnitude more content and, while they do not do a perfect job there is clearly at least some good faith effort going on there. They should still do a better job. Contrast this with Parler, who just doesn't give a damn. Complete abrogation of responsibility, except to kick off accounts that make fun of their "influencers" (shout outs to Devin Nunes's Cow!). Do you see the difference here? Do you see why there might be some, shall we say, recalcitrance to do business with the latter?
      - macinjosh 6y ago
        It is tragic this is the law. It explicitly removes agency from those who commit crimes. The rioters/insurrectionists were all bad people who made bad decisions on their own accord. The concept of incitement dilutes their responsibility. Trump didn't hold a gun to their head and make them storm the capital. Hell, he didn't even suggest it. IMHO, incitement isn't real. It's just spreading blame to people who just made sounds come out of their head. It's barely different than a thought crime.
        Apocryphon 6y ago
        Incitement is a legal concept that has existed for centuries. You are free to make your opinion against it, but it’s been long-established and you’d have to do more to remove it other than reducing it to a “thought crime.”
        Natsu 6y ago
        Legally, incitement is actually pretty constrained to immanent lawless action--i.e. someone doing something bad right now, not at some undefined point in the future, in clear terms. The Volokh Conspiracy discussed this just the other day: https://reason.com/volokh/2021/01/08/can-president-trump-be-impeached-and-removed-on-the-grounds-of-incitement/ https://reason.com/volokh/2021/01/08/can-president-trump-be-...
    - eropple 6y ago
      No, it objectively is not free speech! Threats and incitement aren't protected speech (Brandenburg et al.) and Parler's refusing to do anything about it; AWS cited 98 instances that they themselves provided Parler that weren't attended to. Got anything else?
      - verwyrelevant 6y ago
        What is legal speech or not should be decided by courts, not some activists working for Big Tech or outsourced moderators working for $1 an hour.
        TeaDrunk 6y ago
        It has been, and its enforcement is then passed on to some activists working for Big Tech or outsourced moderators working for $1 an hour. If people don't like how a specific person enforces this or interpreted a judge's rule, they must pony up the money to challenge in court.
        tdeck 6y ago
        > What is legal speech or not should be decided by courts How would that work in practice? Say I run a forum and I want to take down a post that's calling for a mosque to be blown up. Should I need to hire a detective to discover the identity behind the account, file a lawsuit, serve that person some papers, and wait for the case to make its way through the courts? Do I need to leave the post up while that's taking place?
        agiroth 6y ago
        This is what the companies do who want to take down copyrighted content, and what governments do when they want to take down illegal content. Why should any other standard apply? Typically in such cases posts are placed in limbo - still present but usually inaccessible while legal questions are answered. Courts should be making these decisions, not companies interfering in other companies. Why? Because at the end of the day these are questions "the people" need to answer, not unelected managers at tech companies. A few people do not have the right to silence the voice of millions. That's what's happening, fundamentally, and it is being cheered, and you all somehow think this is going to end well.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - Spooky23 6y ago
      You’re allowed to speak without being punished by the government. But when you act like a ass in my house, you hit the road.
      - agiroth 6y ago
        Your house is not the same thing as Twitter or Parler or Amazon or Apple.
        Spooky23 6y ago
        It’s private property. As is AWS. Granted a private home has some additional legal attributes, the point remains the same. Are you allowed to screech racist diatribes to call for a riot at my bar’s open mic night? Are you allowed to scream political speech in a shopping mall? Are you allowed to use the PSTN to organize your criminal enterprise?
        agiroth 6y ago
        You missed the point. Scale is what matters, not privacy. The Supreme Court has ruled that free speech on private property is still protected when questions of scale are introduced. There are circumscriptions on that, but it is still protected.
        Spooky23 6y ago
        Where does scale apply? I don’t recall some carve out in the constitution or in contract law. “Your home is your castle, unless a lot of Vikings show up” If I buy every ticket in Yankee stadium and turn it into a rally for Some political issue, is the management required to just deal with it? What law requires that AWS host people who want to overthrow the government?
        agiroth 6y ago
        https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/326/501/ https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/326/501/ The more people are involved, the more interest the state has in private property. This is why for example we have employment and health laws.
- Pils 6y ago
  I think the recent NYT article on DLive laid out a theory that I find particularly convincing. > In messages obtained by The New York Times, Mr. Wayn told employees last year that he wanted to suspend some of the white supremacists and neo-Nazis who streamed on his site. But, he added, “if today we ban everyone controversial on DLive, the difficulties we will encounter on the growth will be 10x more than having them.” > The strategy, Mr. Wayn said, was to “tolerate” them while amassing more legitimate video game players who would eventually “dilute” the right-wing community.[0] Parler isn't run by "extremely principled libertarians," Parler just wants to get its foot in the door. And when taking on a dominant, well-funded incumbent, few users is perhaps better than no users. It seems to have worked out for Reddit. [0]https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/08/technology/dlive-capitol-mob.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/08/technology/dlive-capitol-...
  - tedunangst 6y ago
    This seems like a poor week to execute such a growth strategy.
  - tootie 6y ago
    Reddit made their bones with what I'd consider very high quality content. I used reddit before the Digg exodus and it was very techy and high-brow for the most part. Then came the cat pics and corny jokes. Then it spiralled.
- cjohnson318 6y ago
  Parler pulled down Lin Wood's posts floating the idea of executing Mike Pence. I guess even Parler has limits on what kind of crazy they want to be associated with.
  - systemvoltage 6y ago
    No, that was pulled off because Lin Wood didn't want to leave a paper trail. Fortunately, many have taken screenshots.
    - cjohnson318 6y ago
      Okay, I stand corrected, thanks. Also, what a stupid idiot that man is.
      - ashtonkem 6y ago
        I’d argue that he’s not stupid, I would argue that he is genuinely unwell. His private behavior, documented in a lawsuit by his former associates, paints a picture of a man whose behavior in private is as dangerous and unhinged as his current public behavior is. He called himself the second coming of Jesus in a private email, allegedly. He is another case of a public figure that would’ve gotten positive coverage in the history books if he’d had the good fortune to die a while ago. Him and Giuliani, who also seems unwell.
        cjohnson318 6y ago
        You could argue that. I think that by 2021 most public figures should understand that deleting a post is not equivalent to not posting it in the first place. "In a deleted post..." is a common way to start news stories these days. He either posted something stupid like an idiot and then deleted for damage control, or he's playing five dimensional chess with us, but my money is on the former.
- dagmx 6y ago
  Thank you for mentioning that Parler do moderate when it goes against their desired message. This is the crux of the issue. Not only is Parler NOT moderating hate speech on their platform, they pretend as if moderation is anathema to their model, thereby further enforcing the views of their users as all encompassing. They exist for the sole reason to provide a particular community, one that is fomenting insurrection and terrorism.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - ebilgenius 6y ago
    And yet Amazon managed to get a plan out of Parler that promised to increase moderation of violent content manually with the help of volunteers. Whether or not that plan was workable is moot now, it seems.
    - dagmx 6y ago
      It is moot because the parler system has no accountability for the company or the "moderators". Parler can just say it was moderated by these random accounts and then try and wash their hands clean. The point is to have accountable, enforceable moderation. For people interested, this is the moderation system according to an interview the CEO gave ( https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/07/opinion/sway-kara-swisher-john-matze.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/07/opinion/sway-kara-swisher... ). > Well, the way we work on our platform is we put everything to a community jury. So everyone’s judged by a jury of their peers in determining whether the action is illegal or against our rules. And so if reported, it goes to a jury of people’s peers. And if it’s deemed illegal, promptly deleted. But, you know, the jury of five people get to decide. And it’s a random jury, so they don’t know each other. They don’t know what they’re voting. They just get the independent facts of the situation and they make their own judgment call. We’ve actually been inviting journalists and other people to join the jury as well, so that we have a nice transparent jury system.
  - bitstan 6y ago
    Google also runs an ISP. Do you want them to police which IP addresses "don't promote insurrection"? Seems like something a judge and jury should perform.. Democracy and all that.. Calling it now. The horseshoe theory is about to manifest in the most real way possible. Silicon Valley is going to clamp down on first amendment rights and vindicate the garbage insurrection we're seeing now. You'd think Americans would've learned something about blowback. The social media platforms we use influence our democracy in a big way. The fact they can share ownership with hostile and non-democratic regimes is curious.
- WatchDog 6y ago
  > purposefully attracted the absolute dregs of society Have Parler done anything specific to attract extremists, other than taking a hard stance on free speech? Just going by their splash page, and values page, I don't see anything that indicates they have. The fact that it's user base may be overwhelmingly "dregs" seems to just be a function of the lack of free speech in mainstream platforms.
  - newacct583 6y ago
    > Have Parler done anything specific to attract extremists The site was, for sure, intended originally as a right wing twitter. While they probably don't want extremists, per se, they have made absolutely no attempt to moderate legitimately violent rhetoric (c.f. the Lin Wood threat last week to have Pence executed, which seems extremely frightening in retrospect). You can see some collected horror shows via aggregation like https://twitter.com/RWParlerWatch https://twitter.com/RWParlerWatch and https://www.reddit.com/r/ParlerWatch/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ParlerWatch/ It is Daily Stormer or 8kun? No, not yet. But it's really, really bad there.
    - WatchDog 6y ago
      That's a shame, I'm somewhat of a free speech absolutist, barring calls for violence and other obvious illegal speech. Looking into Parlers record on moderation, they don't seem to live up to their own values, removing content that doesn't violate their values, as well as failing to remove content that does.
      - newacct583 6y ago
        Kinda. I mean... look, they're just a partisan site. There's nothing new about that, their hook was that they looked like twitter and weren't a vbulletin or whatever. It wasn't supposed to be like this. If it was just a bunch of right wingers hanging out and complaining, akin to the left-wingers you find on /r/politics or whatever, then no one would care. But right wing grievance shifted over the Trump years into explicitly violent and insurrectionist rhetoric and imagery. And as of Wednesday that's no longer a theoretical threat.
cal5k 6y ago
So AWS is now the arbiter of what actions are supposedly harmful to the fabric of democratic society? It's one thing for the courts to do this, it's quite another for infrastructure providers to decide it's now their job to police their customers. We rely on AWS, and now I'm thinking this is a giant mistake - what if they unilaterally decide one day that our business is politically unacceptable because a bad person says nice things about us? The upshot is that this will provide a huge shot in the arm to the decentralized web... and, of course, once people who are plotting bad things all move to end-to-end encrypted platforms like Signal it will be that much more difficult to figure out who the bad people are.
- prh8 6y ago
  Pretty much anyone with any intelligence can determine this, in particular, is harmful to society. This situation isn't just "someone bad saying nice things" and to suggest that is completely disingenuous.
  - cal5k 6y ago
    I've looked at Parler - while I don't find the content at all compelling, it doesn't seem any more dangerous than Twitter. Have we forgotten the truly odious content that was freely available on Twitter during last summer's riots?
    - prh8 6y ago
      I'm not sure how you could come to that conclusion when Parler has been specifically used to plan more violence this week, after many of the people involved have been booted from Twitter.
      - AuryGlenz 6y ago
        And Twitter (along with Reddit and Facebook) wasn’t used to plan violence during the protests last summer?
        6y ago
linuxftw 6y ago
Is Snap Chat moderated?
notsureaboutpg 6y ago
>that undermines the fabric of democratic society This has become our new blasphemy. It's hip to be a Puritan again. It's cool to collectively hate and punish anything which is deemed to "undermine the fabric of society" Right now it means exactly what you all want it to mean. Wait till all sorts of things you liked to do and think are considered to "undermined the fabric of society", then it'll be too late. Good chance for people to sell some books about the delicacy of societal fabric and which outline all the baddies and ghouls that destroy the fabric of society with their various unorthodox moral / political positions. EDIT: People will point out that this specific group / incident / thing was objectively bad. Sure, I agree with that. But the precedent being laid down here will go farther than all of you intended. "undermine the fabric of democratic society" is what I highlighted. Lots of reasonable things undermine the fabric of society (especially corrupt / unjust societies) but should still be allowed. Perhaps this was a poor choice of words, but when talking about what should be censored and what shouldn't be, words matter.
smtlaissezfaire 6y ago
How does one decide what is imminent violence? Who decides it?
- Pfhreak 6y ago
  The platform owner decides, and they come up with a process that is necessarily fuzzy? Our entire system of justice is built on the concept of having to make judgement calls. Moderation is also requires humans to take a look and say, this seems to violate our policies. Take a look at these: https://mobile.twitter.com/GriffinMalone6/status/1348004682841526273?s=20 https://mobile.twitter.com/GriffinMalone6/status/13480046828... Are these threats of imminent violence? I'm confident that a reasonable person would say yes.
- vladTheInhaler 6y ago
  When you demand "trial by combat", and then the angry mob clubs a police officer to death, that's inciting violence.
tengbretson 6y ago
> inciting and planning imminent violence So have we decided that storming a building is violence or not? I actually don't care if we go yes or no on this one, I just want to know the answer.
- michaericalribo 6y ago
  Yes, especially when the people storming the building kill people (and bring flex cuffs and tasers and chant things like ‘hang pence’ and break windows and beat cops and and and...)
- ABeeSea 6y ago
  Attacking cops to get past the barricade around the building certainly is.
  - dredmorbius 6y ago
    Quite. https://youtube.com/watch?v=lhjRXO72v1s https://youtube.com/watch?v=lhjRXO72v1s
- vladTheInhaler 6y ago
  When that building contains the entire legislative branch, when you're carrying guns, clubs, and handcuffs, when you club a police officer to death with a fire extinguisher as you break through the line, then YES, it is violence.
- CydeWeys 6y ago
  Five people are dead, including one police officer who had his head bashed in with a fire extinguisher. You are not arguing in good faith here.
  - tengbretson 6y ago
    You're using the deadly medical emergencies of three participants to bolster the idea that they were behaving violently and you want to accuse me of arguing in bad faith?
Causality1 6y ago
The root is that online speech is 100% privatized. There is no online post office whose only rules are national law and is completely immune from public backlash against its users. Nobody pickets the US post office when Nazis use it to mail hateful newsletters to each other. Online providers don't have that immunity. Everything ever said by their users has the potential to severely impact their financial health if the public reaction is significant enough.
alisonkisk 6y ago
> Precautionary principle 5 people are dead from the Parler-coordinated attack on the US Capitol. It's post-cautionary principle now.
0beah 6y ago
Apple is demanding that Parler be held responsible for the content posted by its users OR it will take it off iOS. So basically Apple is demanding that Parler waive its section 230 protections while lobbying to maintain its own 230 privileges. https://twitter.com/willchamberlain/status/1347736232256798727 https://twitter.com/willchamberlain/status/13477362322567987...
- prh8 6y ago
  Apple requires moderation tools for public user generated content for all apps. If Parler is refusing to do anything, this falls well within Apple's standard rules.
hintymad 6y ago
I guess the current consensus in the US is that it's okay for companies and medias to be arbitrators of what's wrong and what's right. What I don't understand is why companies have double standards. For instances below, a politician, a media anchor, and a random singer. They didn't incite violence? -- Khamenei wanted to eradicate a people: https://twitter.com/khamenei_ir/status/1003332853525110784?lang=en https://twitter.com/khamenei_ir/status/1003332853525110784?l... -- Chris Cuomo said protests didn't need to be peaceful: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ezGyemHna_k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ezGyemHna_k -- A rapper sang about how to rob Chinese families because "they don't believe in bank accounts": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFxOsUe0I8o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFxOsUe0I8o And what about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRnmnxVtDqg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRnmnxVtDqg That's okay because the right people claimed that Kavanaugh was a rapist?
- chillwaves 6y ago
  Amazon didn't write this law. 18 U.S. Code § 2383 - Rebellion or insurrection Whoever incites, sets on foot, assists, or engages in any rebellion or insurrection against the authority of the United States or the laws thereof, or gives aid or comfort thereto, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.
  - roenxi 6y ago
    That reading of the law is frankly stupid. They are organising a protest and AWS isn't able to take on the responsibility of being the moderation team for an entire internet. And not every nasty comment on the internet represents a threat requiring a police response. There isn't any rebellion or insurrection going on, these are protests. We all know what a US political protest looks like, we've been watching them for years. There isn't anything especially new here.
    - f430 6y ago
      It's funny when one side does it, it's protesting and when the other does it, it's terrorism. Straight out of 1984
rob74 6y ago
Call me cynical, but the short term calculus of the tech companies involved seems pretty clear: after the Democrats have now won the Senate too, they are very quick to block Trump, Parler etc. So they are no better than the Republicans who supported or condoned Trump's antics so far and are only now discovering their conscience when it has become clear that his grip on power is slipping. The proverbial rats getting off the sinking ship...
- astrange 6y ago
  It’s hard to ban someone with an army and nukes. Judging from what did actually just happen, their employees would be in danger if they’d done it before this. There are people on Parler discussing killing @jack as is.
seppin 6y ago
The (valid) criticism of "Twitter doesn't moderate their platform worth a damn either" runs into the law of scale. Youtube had just as much copyrighted materials as others, they were big enough to deflect calls to remove them. Twitter, same thing.

by npunt 6y ago

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...
    - bra-ket 6y ago
      That can be very convenient if you want to silence opposition. Just use an “incitement” clause indiscriminately for the entire conservative platform. There’s lots of incitement of violence on Twitter but no one cancels/de-platforms Twitter.
      - eropple 6y ago
        Twitter has a professional moderation staff dealing with many orders of magnitude more content and, while they do not do a perfect job there is clearly at least some good faith effort going on there. They should still do a better job. Contrast this with Parler, who just doesn't give a damn. Complete abrogation of responsibility, except to kick off accounts that make fun of their "influencers" (shout outs to Devin Nunes's Cow!). Do you see the difference here? Do you see why there might be some, shall we say, recalcitrance to do business with the latter?
    - macinjosh 6y ago
      It is tragic this is the law. It explicitly removes agency from those who commit crimes. The rioters/insurrectionists were all bad people who made bad decisions on their own accord. The concept of incitement dilutes their responsibility. Trump didn't hold a gun to their head and make them storm the capital. Hell, he didn't even suggest it. IMHO, incitement isn't real. It's just spreading blame to people who just made sounds come out of their head. It's barely different than a thought crime.
      - Apocryphon 6y ago
        Incitement is a legal concept that has existed for centuries. You are free to make your opinion against it, but it’s been long-established and you’d have to do more to remove it other than reducing it to a “thought crime.”
      - Natsu 6y ago
        Legally, incitement is actually pretty constrained to immanent lawless action--i.e. someone doing something bad right now, not at some undefined point in the future, in clear terms. The Volokh Conspiracy discussed this just the other day: https://reason.com/volokh/2021/01/08/can-president-trump-be-impeached-and-removed-on-the-grounds-of-incitement/ https://reason.com/volokh/2021/01/08/can-president-trump-be-...
  - eropple 6y ago
    No, it objectively is not free speech! Threats and incitement aren't protected speech (Brandenburg et al.) and Parler's refusing to do anything about it; AWS cited 98 instances that they themselves provided Parler that weren't attended to. Got anything else?
    - verwyrelevant 6y ago
      What is legal speech or not should be decided by courts, not some activists working for Big Tech or outsourced moderators working for $1 an hour.
      - TeaDrunk 6y ago
        It has been, and its enforcement is then passed on to some activists working for Big Tech or outsourced moderators working for $1 an hour. If people don't like how a specific person enforces this or interpreted a judge's rule, they must pony up the money to challenge in court.
      - tdeck 6y ago
        > What is legal speech or not should be decided by courts How would that work in practice? Say I run a forum and I want to take down a post that's calling for a mosque to be blown up. Should I need to hire a detective to discover the identity behind the account, file a lawsuit, serve that person some papers, and wait for the case to make its way through the courts? Do I need to leave the post up while that's taking place?
        agiroth 6y ago
        This is what the companies do who want to take down copyrighted content, and what governments do when they want to take down illegal content. Why should any other standard apply? Typically in such cases posts are placed in limbo - still present but usually inaccessible while legal questions are answered. Courts should be making these decisions, not companies interfering in other companies. Why? Because at the end of the day these are questions "the people" need to answer, not unelected managers at tech companies. A few people do not have the right to silence the voice of millions. That's what's happening, fundamentally, and it is being cheered, and you all somehow think this is going to end well.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - Spooky23 6y ago
    You’re allowed to speak without being punished by the government. But when you act like a ass in my house, you hit the road.
    - agiroth 6y ago
      Your house is not the same thing as Twitter or Parler or Amazon or Apple.
      - Spooky23 6y ago
        It’s private property. As is AWS. Granted a private home has some additional legal attributes, the point remains the same. Are you allowed to screech racist diatribes to call for a riot at my bar’s open mic night? Are you allowed to scream political speech in a shopping mall? Are you allowed to use the PSTN to organize your criminal enterprise?
        agiroth 6y ago
        You missed the point. Scale is what matters, not privacy. The Supreme Court has ruled that free speech on private property is still protected when questions of scale are introduced. There are circumscriptions on that, but it is still protected.
        Spooky23 6y ago
        Where does scale apply? I don’t recall some carve out in the constitution or in contract law. “Your home is your castle, unless a lot of Vikings show up” If I buy every ticket in Yankee stadium and turn it into a rally for Some political issue, is the management required to just deal with it? What law requires that AWS host people who want to overthrow the government?
        agiroth 6y ago
        https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/326/501/ https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/326/501/ The more people are involved, the more interest the state has in private property. This is why for example we have employment and health laws.
Pils 6y ago
I think the recent NYT article on DLive laid out a theory that I find particularly convincing. > In messages obtained by The New York Times, Mr. Wayn told employees last year that he wanted to suspend some of the white supremacists and neo-Nazis who streamed on his site. But, he added, “if today we ban everyone controversial on DLive, the difficulties we will encounter on the growth will be 10x more than having them.” > The strategy, Mr. Wayn said, was to “tolerate” them while amassing more legitimate video game players who would eventually “dilute” the right-wing community.[0] Parler isn't run by "extremely principled libertarians," Parler just wants to get its foot in the door. And when taking on a dominant, well-funded incumbent, few users is perhaps better than no users. It seems to have worked out for Reddit. [0]https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/08/technology/dlive-capitol-mob.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/08/technology/dlive-capitol-...
- tedunangst 6y ago
  This seems like a poor week to execute such a growth strategy.
- tootie 6y ago
  Reddit made their bones with what I'd consider very high quality content. I used reddit before the Digg exodus and it was very techy and high-brow for the most part. Then came the cat pics and corny jokes. Then it spiralled.
cjohnson318 6y ago
Parler pulled down Lin Wood's posts floating the idea of executing Mike Pence. I guess even Parler has limits on what kind of crazy they want to be associated with.
- systemvoltage 6y ago
  No, that was pulled off because Lin Wood didn't want to leave a paper trail. Fortunately, many have taken screenshots.
  - cjohnson318 6y ago
    Okay, I stand corrected, thanks. Also, what a stupid idiot that man is.
    - ashtonkem 6y ago
      I’d argue that he’s not stupid, I would argue that he is genuinely unwell. His private behavior, documented in a lawsuit by his former associates, paints a picture of a man whose behavior in private is as dangerous and unhinged as his current public behavior is. He called himself the second coming of Jesus in a private email, allegedly. He is another case of a public figure that would’ve gotten positive coverage in the history books if he’d had the good fortune to die a while ago. Him and Giuliani, who also seems unwell.
      - cjohnson318 6y ago
        You could argue that. I think that by 2021 most public figures should understand that deleting a post is not equivalent to not posting it in the first place. "In a deleted post..." is a common way to start news stories these days. He either posted something stupid like an idiot and then deleted for damage control, or he's playing five dimensional chess with us, but my money is on the former.
dagmx 6y ago
Thank you for mentioning that Parler do moderate when it goes against their desired message. This is the crux of the issue. Not only is Parler NOT moderating hate speech on their platform, they pretend as if moderation is anathema to their model, thereby further enforcing the views of their users as all encompassing. They exist for the sole reason to provide a particular community, one that is fomenting insurrection and terrorism.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- ebilgenius 6y ago
  And yet Amazon managed to get a plan out of Parler that promised to increase moderation of violent content manually with the help of volunteers. Whether or not that plan was workable is moot now, it seems.
  - dagmx 6y ago
    It is moot because the parler system has no accountability for the company or the "moderators". Parler can just say it was moderated by these random accounts and then try and wash their hands clean. The point is to have accountable, enforceable moderation. For people interested, this is the moderation system according to an interview the CEO gave ( https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/07/opinion/sway-kara-swisher-john-matze.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/07/opinion/sway-kara-swisher... ). > Well, the way we work on our platform is we put everything to a community jury. So everyone’s judged by a jury of their peers in determining whether the action is illegal or against our rules. And so if reported, it goes to a jury of people’s peers. And if it’s deemed illegal, promptly deleted. But, you know, the jury of five people get to decide. And it’s a random jury, so they don’t know each other. They don’t know what they’re voting. They just get the independent facts of the situation and they make their own judgment call. We’ve actually been inviting journalists and other people to join the jury as well, so that we have a nice transparent jury system.
- bitstan 6y ago
  Google also runs an ISP. Do you want them to police which IP addresses "don't promote insurrection"? Seems like something a judge and jury should perform.. Democracy and all that.. Calling it now. The horseshoe theory is about to manifest in the most real way possible. Silicon Valley is going to clamp down on first amendment rights and vindicate the garbage insurrection we're seeing now. You'd think Americans would've learned something about blowback. The social media platforms we use influence our democracy in a big way. The fact they can share ownership with hostile and non-democratic regimes is curious.
WatchDog 6y ago
> purposefully attracted the absolute dregs of society Have Parler done anything specific to attract extremists, other than taking a hard stance on free speech? Just going by their splash page, and values page, I don't see anything that indicates they have. The fact that it's user base may be overwhelmingly "dregs" seems to just be a function of the lack of free speech in mainstream platforms.
- newacct583 6y ago
  > Have Parler done anything specific to attract extremists The site was, for sure, intended originally as a right wing twitter. While they probably don't want extremists, per se, they have made absolutely no attempt to moderate legitimately violent rhetoric (c.f. the Lin Wood threat last week to have Pence executed, which seems extremely frightening in retrospect). You can see some collected horror shows via aggregation like https://twitter.com/RWParlerWatch https://twitter.com/RWParlerWatch and https://www.reddit.com/r/ParlerWatch/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ParlerWatch/ It is Daily Stormer or 8kun? No, not yet. But it's really, really bad there.
  - WatchDog 6y ago
    That's a shame, I'm somewhat of a free speech absolutist, barring calls for violence and other obvious illegal speech. Looking into Parlers record on moderation, they don't seem to live up to their own values, removing content that doesn't violate their values, as well as failing to remove content that does.
    - newacct583 6y ago
      Kinda. I mean... look, they're just a partisan site. There's nothing new about that, their hook was that they looked like twitter and weren't a vbulletin or whatever. It wasn't supposed to be like this. If it was just a bunch of right wingers hanging out and complaining, akin to the left-wingers you find on /r/politics or whatever, then no one would care. But right wing grievance shifted over the Trump years into explicitly violent and insurrectionist rhetoric and imagery. And as of Wednesday that's no longer a theoretical threat.

cal5k 6y ago

So AWS is now the arbiter of what actions are supposedly harmful to the fabric of democratic society? It's one thing for the courts to do this, it's quite another for infrastructure providers to decide it's now their job to police their customers. We rely on AWS, and now I'm thinking this is a giant mistake - what if they unilaterally decide one day that our business is politically unacceptable because a bad person says nice things about us? The upshot is that this will provide a huge shot in the arm to the decentralized web... and, of course, once people who are plotting bad things all move to end-to-end encrypted platforms like Signal it will be that much more difficult to figure out who the bad people are.

prh8 6y ago
Pretty much anyone with any intelligence can determine this, in particular, is harmful to society. This situation isn't just "someone bad saying nice things" and to suggest that is completely disingenuous.
- cal5k 6y ago
  I've looked at Parler - while I don't find the content at all compelling, it doesn't seem any more dangerous than Twitter. Have we forgotten the truly odious content that was freely available on Twitter during last summer's riots?
  - prh8 6y ago
    I'm not sure how you could come to that conclusion when Parler has been specifically used to plan more violence this week, after many of the people involved have been booted from Twitter.
    - AuryGlenz 6y ago
      And Twitter (along with Reddit and Facebook) wasn’t used to plan violence during the protests last summer?
      - 6y ago

linuxftw 6y ago

Is Snap Chat moderated?

notsureaboutpg 6y ago

>that undermines the fabric of democratic society This has become our new blasphemy. It's hip to be a Puritan again. It's cool to collectively hate and punish anything which is deemed to "undermine the fabric of society" Right now it means exactly what you all want it to mean. Wait till all sorts of things you liked to do and think are considered to "undermined the fabric of society", then it'll be too late. Good chance for people to sell some books about the delicacy of societal fabric and which outline all the baddies and ghouls that destroy the fabric of society with their various unorthodox moral / political positions. EDIT: People will point out that this specific group / incident / thing was objectively bad. Sure, I agree with that. But the precedent being laid down here will go farther than all of you intended. "undermine the fabric of democratic society" is what I highlighted. Lots of reasonable things undermine the fabric of society (especially corrupt / unjust societies) but should still be allowed. Perhaps this was a poor choice of words, but when talking about what should be censored and what shouldn't be, words matter.

smtlaissezfaire 6y ago

How does one decide what is imminent violence? Who decides it?

Pfhreak 6y ago
The platform owner decides, and they come up with a process that is necessarily fuzzy? Our entire system of justice is built on the concept of having to make judgement calls. Moderation is also requires humans to take a look and say, this seems to violate our policies. Take a look at these: https://mobile.twitter.com/GriffinMalone6/status/1348004682841526273?s=20 https://mobile.twitter.com/GriffinMalone6/status/13480046828... Are these threats of imminent violence? I'm confident that a reasonable person would say yes.
vladTheInhaler 6y ago
When you demand "trial by combat", and then the angry mob clubs a police officer to death, that's inciting violence.

tengbretson 6y ago

> inciting and planning imminent violence So have we decided that storming a building is violence or not? I actually don't care if we go yes or no on this one, I just want to know the answer.

michaericalribo 6y ago
Yes, especially when the people storming the building kill people (and bring flex cuffs and tasers and chant things like ‘hang pence’ and break windows and beat cops and and and...)
ABeeSea 6y ago
Attacking cops to get past the barricade around the building certainly is.
- dredmorbius 6y ago
  Quite. https://youtube.com/watch?v=lhjRXO72v1s https://youtube.com/watch?v=lhjRXO72v1s
vladTheInhaler 6y ago
When that building contains the entire legislative branch, when you're carrying guns, clubs, and handcuffs, when you club a police officer to death with a fire extinguisher as you break through the line, then YES, it is violence.
CydeWeys 6y ago
Five people are dead, including one police officer who had his head bashed in with a fire extinguisher. You are not arguing in good faith here.
- tengbretson 6y ago
  You're using the deadly medical emergencies of three participants to bolster the idea that they were behaving violently and you want to accuse me of arguing in bad faith?

Causality1 6y ago

The root is that online speech is 100% privatized. There is no online post office whose only rules are national law and is completely immune from public backlash against its users. Nobody pickets the US post office when Nazis use it to mail hateful newsletters to each other. Online providers don't have that immunity. Everything ever said by their users has the potential to severely impact their financial health if the public reaction is significant enough.

alisonkisk 6y ago

> Precautionary principle 5 people are dead from the Parler-coordinated attack on the US Capitol. It's post-cautionary principle now.

0beah 6y ago

Apple is demanding that Parler be held responsible for the content posted by its users OR it will take it off iOS. So basically Apple is demanding that Parler waive its section 230 protections while lobbying to maintain its own 230 privileges. https://twitter.com/willchamberlain/status/1347736232256798727 https://twitter.com/willchamberlain/status/13477362322567987...

prh8 6y ago
Apple requires moderation tools for public user generated content for all apps. If Parler is refusing to do anything, this falls well within Apple's standard rules.

hintymad 6y ago

I guess the current consensus in the US is that it's okay for companies and medias to be arbitrators of what's wrong and what's right. What I don't understand is why companies have double standards. For instances below, a politician, a media anchor, and a random singer. They didn't incite violence? -- Khamenei wanted to eradicate a people: https://twitter.com/khamenei_ir/status/1003332853525110784?lang=en https://twitter.com/khamenei_ir/status/1003332853525110784?l... -- Chris Cuomo said protests didn't need to be peaceful: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ezGyemHna_k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ezGyemHna_k -- A rapper sang about how to rob Chinese families because "they don't believe in bank accounts": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFxOsUe0I8o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFxOsUe0I8o And what about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRnmnxVtDqg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRnmnxVtDqg That's okay because the right people claimed that Kavanaugh was a rapist?

chillwaves 6y ago
Amazon didn't write this law. 18 U.S. Code § 2383 - Rebellion or insurrection Whoever incites, sets on foot, assists, or engages in any rebellion or insurrection against the authority of the United States or the laws thereof, or gives aid or comfort thereto, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.
- roenxi 6y ago
  That reading of the law is frankly stupid. They are organising a protest and AWS isn't able to take on the responsibility of being the moderation team for an entire internet. And not every nasty comment on the internet represents a threat requiring a police response. There isn't any rebellion or insurrection going on, these are protests. We all know what a US political protest looks like, we've been watching them for years. There isn't anything especially new here.
  - f430 6y ago
    It's funny when one side does it, it's protesting and when the other does it, it's terrorism. Straight out of 1984

rob74 6y ago

Call me cynical, but the short term calculus of the tech companies involved seems pretty clear: after the Democrats have now won the Senate too, they are very quick to block Trump, Parler etc. So they are no better than the Republicans who supported or condoned Trump's antics so far and are only now discovering their conscience when it has become clear that his grip on power is slipping. The proverbial rats getting off the sinking ship...

astrange 6y ago
It’s hard to ban someone with an army and nukes. Judging from what did actually just happen, their employees would be in danger if they’d done it before this. There are people on Parler discussing killing @jack as is.

seppin 6y ago

The (valid) criticism of "Twitter doesn't moderate their platform worth a damn either" runs into the law of scale. Youtube had just as much copyrighted materials as others, they were big enough to deflect calls to remove them. Twitter, same thing.