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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 anoth
by 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 agoPretty 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 agoI'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 agoI'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 agoAnd Twitter (along with Reddit and Facebook) wasn’t used to plan violence during the protests last summer?
- alisonkisk 6y agoNo, it wasn't.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- CodeShmode 6y agoShow us the BLM tweet equivalent of "We need to systematically start assassinating Liberal leaders"
- ImprovedSilence 6y agowell... there's a #killallcops. I'm sure a quick googling could find you plenty more.. : https://twitter.com/hashtag/killallcops?lang=en https://twitter.com/hashtag/killallcops?lang=en
- CodeShmode 6y agoWould you consider that hashtag to have serious intent to incite people to commit acts of violence?
- ImprovedSilence 6y agoThe same level of seriousness as any other violence condoning call. In that its hard to gauge intent and willingness to follow through vs. “just saying it”..? where do you draw the line? Do you let one group call for un mitigated violence against a group of people, but not another group, just because you personally dont believe they are serious, even if it might inspire other to take action..?
- CodeShmode 6y agoYes, context is important. If someone makes a call to violence that is not intended to be taken seriously and is not at risk of being taken seriously that is different from making a call to violence in the hope that someone picks it up at a time when people are likely to act on it. There is a test for this decided at the supreme court level: inciteful speech can only be prohibited if the speech is "directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action."
- prh8 6y agoThe summer violence is not equitable to what's being planned on Parler. This is not run of the mill shit going on.
- muglug 6y agoIs it still available today? If it has since been removed, that's due to moderation!
- kordlessagain 6y agoSo you signed up for Parler and gave them your drivers license?
- Natsu 6y agoThat's only if you want to be verified (i.e. like a blue checkmark on Twitter). I installed it long ago to see what all the fuss was and never used it and didn't give them a damn thing.
- HDMI_Cable 6y agoOne major difference though, is that Parler (right now) only really hosts said dangerous content, while Twitter is >99% innocent.
- zozbot234 6y agoParler sprang up as a reaction to widespread deplatforming of both mainstream conservatives and violent radicals. What this achieves in practice is giving violent extremists a platform where they're free to radicalize ("redpill") moderate conservatives who've even been primed (via deplatforming) to distrust mainstream media and seek alternate sources of information. It's the opposite of what you want if you care about re-unifying the political landscape around rejection of violent extremism.
- joshuamorton 6y agoCan you give an example of a mainstream conservative who didn't advocate for violence who was deplatformed?
- bra-ket 6y agoI 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. You can have a monopoly on free speech.. just kidding , purely decentralized. Hit me up with your hot ideas and Go chops.
- alexggordon 6y agoI disagree with this. This might be a solution, but it is not "the" solution. I really, truly believe that any startup idea has to pass the child pornography test. Most B2C companies have to deal with this at some point if they allow user to user interaction. A decentralized platform as advocated for could not survive if it's not capable of censuring things. You have to censure for child pornography--it's illegal to host it. Court actions around torrents have held that the sites hosting them are not decentralized--The Pirate Bay is at fault for hosting illegally obtained content. Same thing with this--as long as hosting child pornography is illegal (and it should be, not debating that) you won't have a mainstream "decentralized" social media site[0]. This follows for all the other stuff that's going on. Inciting violence is illegal. That, plain and simple, is why Trump was removed from Twitter. Twitter even waited until his violence actually killed people. Even Parler recognizes this[1] and has started censuring, because it could be sued into the ground for inciting violence. If you think that there's a technological solution for this problem--you're missing the bigger picture. Big social media tech _loves_ this stuff--people talk about it all day--they even donate to the groups that help organize it[2]. We're not missing a technological solution--we're missing a legislative one. [0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/12/02/parler-pornography-problem/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/12/02/parler-... [1] https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/09/parler-reportedly-removed-posts-by-trump-affiliate-lin-wood-calling-for-execution-of-vp-mike-pence/ https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/09/parler-reportedly-removed-... [2] https://documented.net/2021/01/republican-attorneys-general-dark-money-group-organized-protest-preceding-capitol-mob-attack/ https://documented.net/2021/01/republican-attorneys-general-...
- Natsu 6y agoWhat about right now? "Hang Mike Pence" has been trending lately. I don't like anyone promoting violence.
- logicchains 6y agoAnd stuff like #killallmen and #killallcops was trending for months, but nobody banned Twitter from their infrastructure.
- objectivetruth 6y agoNobody subsequently tried to kill all the men nor all the cops, so nobody felt the need to ban Twitter. People actually did storm the US Capitol in at attempt to execute Mike Pence, among other elected leaders. So it's, you know, different.
- rvz 6y agoMost people here already have instantly forgotten about the planned action of millions of dollars worth of damage and looting of businesses and federal buildings that were burned down during the summer riots with BLM and Antifa inciting violence during the run up to the elections last year which the content is still freely available on Twitter with it being hosted on AWS. So I do not see how Twitter is any different to Parler here if I can still find both of this content (and the users responsible) on their platforms. Perhaps the moderation on Twitter has a bias to one camp or its users have a heavy bias to only reporting the content that they think 'violates the ToS'. The fact is, both social networking sites here have this content hosted on AWS and either have a poor or a bias in moderation of this content.
- Apocryphon 6y agoTo resolve this whataboutism, I'd be perfectly fine with banning Twitter until they improved their moderation practices. But it's whataboutism nevertheless, no?
- agiroth 6y agoAmazon made the decision to change that calculation and in this case, whataboutism is perfectly valid.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y agoI can't speak for everyone, but I haven't forgotten about those things and was arguing at the time that much of that rhetoric needed to be shut down. I do wish that internet platforms would consistently shut down everyone who plans violence, but I'm hardly gonna say that this violence should be allowed just because other kinds were allowed in the past.
- zanek 6y agoPeople are literally planning to murder other people on Parler but you don't find the content compelling ? There are tons of posts like this on Parler. This isnt a slippery slope, they arent moderating at all https://twitter.com/IntelDoge/status/1348099918381068289 https://twitter.com/IntelDoge/status/1348099918381068289
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- anoncake 6y agoThe question is not if Amazon made the right decision in this case but if they can be trusted to make it in general.
- prh8 6y agoThat question is only applicable if you equate this extreme current situation with something incredibly bland and normal.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- anoncake 6y agoWhat is a situation that's both bland and incredible supposed to look like?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- agiroth 6y agoExactly because right now, between Apple, Google and AWS, several billion people have had a decision made for them. That looks like government behavior to me.
- ImprovedSilence 6y agoI think them getting booted is a slippery slope. Much better to have things like this in plain sight. Think about how much harder it would be to identify people storming the capitol w/o their social media platforms... Either way, it's great when "they" are harmful to society. I'm not so sure it's not possible to end up on the wrong side of that gun down the road when "they" define "harmful"... I'm also curious as to what AWS's stance is regarding ISIS or radical militants in other regions of the world. I genuinely don't know the answer here.
- amanaplanacanal 6y agoI'm pretty sure they can't legally do business with ISIS.
- dlp211 6y agoThese groups are only able to organize and recruit at this scale because of these platforms.
- notsureaboutpg 6y agoThe Communist Manifesto is harmful to society. It contains many explicit calls for a specific group of people to commit violence against another specific group of people. And yet, we shouldn't ban it off the Internet, it's a very valuable piece of information to have out there.
- WindyLakeReturn 6y ago>Pretty much anyone with any intelligence can determine this This seems to be another way of saying 'if you don't agree with this view, you are likely stupid'. That's not a great opening, and in general if one finds themselves thinking their view is the only intelligent one, they should consider it a sign they are only considering a strawman of alternatives and not the real views held.
- throwaheyy 6y agoYes, they get to be, that’s what terms of service are.
- mahastore 6y agoYes they are (arbiter of what action they can take) if you use their platform to call for murdering and lynching people. Did you read the article and see the screenshots AWS sent to Parler?
- organsnyder 6y agoAWS has the right to decide with whom they would like to do business. Parler is free to migrate to a competitor.
- elongatedMusku 6y agoI don't see a problem here. The big guys bullying on smaller guys. Its right when they do what I support.
- muglug 6y ago> what if they unilaterally decide one day that our business is politically unacceptable because a bad person says nice things about us? That's not a great analogy. It's more like a banquet hall agreeing to host a far-right rally, which in turn causes the hall's caterer to sever all ties to the hall.
- MuffinFlavored 6y ago> are supposedly harmful to the fabric of democratic society This is the part that I don't get. Why is this part up for debate? What is the truth? What's the evidence one way or the other? On one hand, Parler was the platform a bunch of right-wingers and domestic terrorists used to coordinate a half-non-violent half-violent storm on Capitol Hill. Parler didn't moderate that, and therefore they are being shut down by big tech who has deemed they deserve to be censored. On the other, I'm sure we could find some like... radical Islam groups on Twitter/Facebook, no? Or is that the difference? Twitter + Facebook appropriately censor content and Parler didn't and it's as simple as that?
- alisonkisk 6y agoYes, it's as simple as that. Organizations that keep criminal activity off of their site don't get hassled by their upstream providers.
- MuffinFlavored 6y agoYou're aware #HangMikePence is trending on Twitter right now unmoderated, right?
- ryanSrich 6y agoThis comment is being brigaded so I’m removing it.
- PaulDavisThe1st 6y agoYour claims and position on these issues are not universally held. You may very well hold them honestly and sincerely, but they are not incontovertible facts, but rather your assessment of things. In particular, your beliefs and understandings are not held by some of the people who hold the kind of power being discussed in this comment thread.
- zionic 6y agoWe spend several million a year on AWS and intend to migrate as soon as possible. We’re a small drop in their bucket, but I am just done dealing with them.
- fooey 6y agoWhere do you think you're going to go where they don't have the same sort of policies? I'm actually very curious to see who will be willing to accept Parler's business.
- a3n 6y agoWho hosts InfoWars?
- kortilla 6y agoISPs sit behind section 230. They can’t take a political stance for shit on the wire. The next move for Parler would be to build their own data center and buy service from ISPs.
- TheKarateKid 6y agoOr use cloud services from companies which historically haven't played politics, many of which are ISPs as well: Verizon, ATT, IBM, etc.
- astrange 6y agoSection 230 applies equally to ISPs and AWS and it does not do what you say it does. (actually AWS is an ISP) And B2C ISPs can discriminate because Republicans, you know, ended net neutrality.
- throwaway201103 6y agoIt's a big world. Someone will host them.
- elongatedMusku 6y agoGood. Voting with money is the best. Hope your business does well.
- Sebguer 6y agoYou can't "slippery slope" when the quoted email makes it pretty clear that Amazon has outlined specific and clear problems that Parler has refused to address. Unless your business is being used to post hate messages, including explicit threats to kill people, your concern is unwarranted. If it is, well, then you should probably reasonably actually be concerned about AWS shutting you down.
- spaginal 6y agoAWS has shown they will shut you down for political reasons. Intellectually, Parler hasn’t demonstrated anything other than the fact that they don’t politically fall in line with the red scare style feeling sweeping leftist politics and its associated supportive corporations.
- alisonkisk 6y agoIf demandinf murder is your political platform, and disallowing murder is leftist, then I guess AWS will shut you down for leftist political reasons, yeah.
- Sebguer 6y agoNo, they've explicitly demonstrated that they're unwilling to moderate people making threats of violence, to a degree that Amazon is unwilling to continue to provide them with the tools to let their users make those threats. The right to threaten people with death is, weirdly enough, not actually a right.
- systemvoltage 6y agoCitation needed. Where?
- CodeShmode 6y agoDid you read the Parler screen captures in the article? They are blatently and directly calling for death and murder. Prohibiting the inciting of violence is not a political decision.
- WrtCdEvrydy 6y agoShould AWS host child pornography? How about a website for a terrorist site just wanting to kill people?
- billy_beef 6y agothese are explicitly illegal activities with clearly argued jurisprudence. perhaps what parler hosted was illegal, but that should be up to a court to decide, not amazon.
- chillwaves 6y ago18 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.
- billy_beef 6y agoI'm not exactly disagreeing that maybe parler should be taken to task, but amazon should not be the ones to do it. although, the historical application of the insurrection act has been incredibly political and inconsistent (the pullman strikes), so citing it as the primary reason for booting parler seems a little suspect to me.
- chillwaves 6y agoThey were literally talking about/planning on attacking the process of peaceful transfer of power from one president to the next. I'm pretty sure you know why this cannot be tolerated.
- cal5k 6y agoI also think there's an incredible amount of cognitive dissonance from people who staunchly defend Section 230, then turn around and cite comments submitted by users as an excuse to shut down the entire platform. There's no way in hell they're able to keep up with the moderation requirements given how fast the platform must be growing right now. I don't even like Parler, but I think this is a dangerous, dangerous precedent that will only turn up the temperature.
- notatoad 6y agoThis "so service x is now the arbiter..." argument keeps coming up in the threads about companies trying to limit their exposure. Yes. They absolutely 100% are the arbiter of what you can do on their platforms. They have not only the right, but the responsibility to kick you off if your actions threaten the continued operation of their platform, either directly or indirectly. And allowing the sort of speech that brings down a government is absolutely something that threatens the whole platform. Even if Amazon wanted you to storm the capitol, execute the VP, or whatever other dangerous stuff is currently being discussed on Parler, allowing that discussion to happen publicly on AWS-hosted websites would be a bad business decision. It is 100% their job to police their customers, it always has been, it always will be. This isn't new, it's just how a responsible business operates. No business has ever been immune from the actions their clientele takes, and business have always dropped clients they didn't want to be associated with. (And "seditionist" is not a protected class that is legally prevented from discrimination)
- systemvoltage 6y agoI don’t hear a peep from people about AWS banning Bitcoin miners. They’re providing proof of what kind of content exists on their servers. It’s the same with child porn and other criminal content. People offended by AWS’s stance, please help explain the differences in aforementioned violations. The only odd part of all of this is why now? AWS should have banned them during formation. They tolerated it because of Trump being in power. This is the only cowardly hypocritical thing I see with the recent bans. All of a sudden cat is acting like a Lion in the cave after the Lion has left.
- XorNot 6y agoThe heck are you talking about? Bitcoin isn't illegal. And AWS actually have numerous reporting obligations surrounding the use of instances for illegal activity and content if they become aware of it. Which in the case of Parler they're explicitly and overtly aware.
- systemvoltage 6y ago
- Spooky23 6y agoDid you read your contract terms with AWS? I’d suggest reviewing section 1.4 of the service terms (https://aws.amazon.com/service-terms/ https://aws.amazon.com/service-terms/) and the AUP (https://aws.amazon.com/aup/ https://aws.amazon.com/aup/) In any business, your conduct is meaningful. If you decided to start facilitating a white supremacist insurrection, my company’s standard terms allow termination, and we would.
- skindoe 6y agoWhat white supremacist are you referring too? And what insurrection?
- a3n 6y ago> So AWS is now the arbiter of what actions are supposedly harmful to the fabric of democratic society? No. AWS asserts the right to deny access to its infrastructure for violation of its terms of service, and the right to determine what those terms of service are. I think this is an opportunity for someone else to sell infrastructure with zero content restrictions. There is clearly a market.
- rgbrenner 6y agoParler is in violation of the AWS AUP that they agreed to when they signed up. That's why they included posts from Parler that called for violence.. because that's a prohibited use of AWS. https://aws.amazon.com/aup/ https://aws.amazon.com/aup/ If you are violating their AUP, you should be concerned they might cut you off. If you disagree that those posts called for violence, I'd like to see the mental gymnastics you come up with.
- billy_beef 6y agowhich part? " may be harmful to others" ? This is a clause so broad as to cover nearly all speech.
- supertrope 6y agoBusinesses can refuse service for any reason unless it's a reason prohibited by law. It is annoying that terms of service have broad sweeping language on prohibited uses but it is impossible to list every possible scenario.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- systemvoltage 6y agoDid you read the article and some of the screenshots? Are you ok with hosting violent content?
- TeaDrunk 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. Infrastructure providers have already decided they get to police their customers, eg. cloudflare dropping stormfront or other white supremacists as customers. EDIT: To be clear I agree it is entirely worrying that infrastructure that takes up a significant amount of the known internet is under the control of a large corporation that can seemingly decide to boot people for violations of terms of service. I just want to disagree that this is new. It's not new. It's old and well-established by now. If we want to change this, it'll have to be through a law.
- mech422 6y agoAWS is now and always has been the arbiter of what they allow on their platform. Parler agrees to the terms of service, just like any other AWS customer. Also, providers have to police their customers - they don't want 'wrongful death' lawsuits, for instance. As for you other concerns, the conventional wisdom around HN is "Don't build your business on third party infrastructure/services". If they close your account because 'a bad person says nice things' about you, or just because they don't like your face, that's a known risk. There a numerous examples of cloud providers (especially google) shutting down accounts. Its nothing new, and should be accounted for in your business plan.
- ehnto 6y agoI think it's the organised violence in particular this time. But to your broader point, either AWS is a privately operated company or it's public infrastructure, I don't believe it can be both. There is absolutely nothing stopping the owners of Parler from running their own servers either. I think you are right that they will move to more fringe parts of the web, but I think that is just how regular society works. A society holds some values, and if you don't hold those same values within a certain margin or actively work against them in this case (non-violence), that society pushes you to the fringes.
- crazygringo 6y ago> So AWS is now the arbiter of what actions are supposedly harmful to the fabric of democratic society? No, everybody is. In a democratic society, it is the responsibility of every citizen and corporation to act in accordance with democratic values. At the end of the day, democracies aren't built out of laws written on paper -- they're built on the everyday decisions people take such as voting, arguing over issues, and condemning non-democratic bad actors. Just as people can protest in the streets against undemocratic abuses of power, so corporate entities can and should deplatform people and organizations that explicitly, violently threaten our democracy. It's up to every person and corporation to be their own arbiter. That's the ultimate safeguard of democracy. If AWS waited for a court order, it could very well be too late.
- Fellshard 6y agoThe exact same argument could be applied regarding free speech, mind. While the government is the only entity /legally bound/ to not restrict speech, it is also untenable to have a government that cannot touch it presiding over an oligarchy of corporations that are wholly censorious. If free speech is critical to a democratic society (which it is), it is necessary that corporations do what they can to uphold it.
- hypersoar 6y agoThe actual solution is to not allow the existence of enormously powerful mega-corporations. The problem is that we have these companies, each able to influence hundreds of millions to billions of people with virtually no accountability. Facebook and its subsidiaries comprise the most far-reaching media apparatus in history, and the whole thing is under the control of a guy. The same is largely true of Amazon. We shouldn't have let this happen.
- agiroth 6y ago> No, everybody is. In a democratic society, it is the responsibility of every citizen and corporation to act in accordance with democratic values. Exactly, everybody is. In a democratic society, everybody decides together what the rules for things like this are, not 2-3 tech CEOs. I say, draft laws around this and let the people vote on them. Then at least we'd have some basis for doing things like this.
- tshaddox 6y agoNope, AWS is just the arbiter of what actions they allow to be hosted on their product. Of course no one is suggesting that Amazon or any one technology company is the sole arbiter of claims about morality or legality.
- anigbrowl 6y agoSo AWS is now the arbiter of what actions are supposedly harmful to the fabric of democratic society? It'd be great if people could move past these extremely cliche arguments and start addressing substantive ones instead of living in some theoretical free speech bubble where a meritocracy of ideas and the superiority of truth are assumed as implicit, without regard to real-world experience.
- newacct583 6y ago> So AWS is now the arbiter of what actions are supposedly harmful to the fabric of democratic society? No, there are other hosts. But... is it really so wrong to be glad that someone is trying to arbitrate this? Parler was a persistent host to exactly the kind of violent rhetoric that turned into Wednesday's coup. At some point we have to make a call and shut stuff like that down, right? I mean, yes, it sucks that the overlap between "conventional republican politics" and "rhetoric inspiring real life violence" is so high. So surely there is some friendly fire here on speech we'd like to keep. But... I don't see why Amazon should be responsible for letting this fester like it has either.
- throwaway201103 6y agoMaybe it's better that the discussions are happening where they can be seen? The other half of the problem on Wednesday was how unprepared and weakly defended the Capitol was, in light of all this planning was going on on Parler. If it had been happening on GPG-encrypted email, would that be better?
- newacct583 6y agoI don't think there was any problem with the intelligence side of things. We knew the mob was going to be there because they were attendees at a rally organized by the president for the express purpose of pressuring congress. And we knew the rhetoric around this had been violent going back months. As far as the honeypot idea: I guess you have to balance that against the danger that these communities will fester and grow. To be blunt: Parler isn't a planning tool for Serious Terrorists, it's a casual internet feed for people who aren't sophisicated enough to use encrypted email or Signal. The danger to Parler isn't that it's a place for a tight team to plan an overthrow of the government, it's a place for millions of MAGA fans to be convinced that overthrowing the government is a good thing.
- tootie 6y agoIt's hard to know where to draw the line but I think we can very comfortably say that it's somewhere south of Nazi terrorists. Speech issues are tricky but even the Supreme Court doesn't think incitement is protected by the first amendment.
- jsolson 6y ago> 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? You're making the argument for why this choice is not "free" for AWS. Not only do they lose a paying customer, but they cause some of their customers to debate the risks of doing business with AWS. It's precisely this balance of capital (including goodwill) that gives private companies the freedom to choose with whom they do business. Customers are the lifeblood of a business, but every one of them is also a potential liability. Every severance of a relationship with a customer carries more cost than merely the lost revenue. So no, AWS _alone_ is not the arbiter of what actions are supposedly harmful to the fabric of democratic society -- the market for serving infrastructure is vibrant and competitive. If nobody in the market will do business with a given customer, well, that's capitalism for you. (and just in case it wasn't clear, I applaud AWS making this choice, and hope the market at large will do the same)
- thesteamboat 6y agoI agree that we as society do not want to outsource censorship to private corporations. Despite that I still think this (namely deplatforming Parler in this moment) is a better outcome for us. Amazon had to choose between appointing itself a censor or being complicit in fomenting violence via offering their services. Both choices suck, but that's sometimes the way cards lie. > 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. I think society's main problem here is the normalization of conspiratorial thinking and the radicalization that ensues. People have always been able to plot in secret and I'm not worried about law enforcement hypothetically being unable to monitor all wrong-thinkers thoughts in real time. In some respects I think this recent spate of censorious actions (Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter) could be the ideal outcome in that they've always had the implicit power to censor and the public has pretty much shrugged. If society is now forced to reckon with how much of public life it has ceded to Mr. Zuckerberg's whims all the better. If decentralization comes to the web, and tech monopolies and oligopolies are cracked open to competition I will shed no tears.
- xxpor 6y ago>I agree that we as society do not want to outsource censorship to private corporations This is how the US has worked for at least 100 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_Picture_Association_film_rating_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_Picture_Association_fil... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_blacklist https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_blacklist https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comics_Code_Authority https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comics_Code_Authority https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parental_Advisory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parental_Advisory From just off the top of my head
- thesteamboat 6y agoWhile I agree as a matter of fact that these organizations exist I was asserting a preference rather than an understanding of the world as it is. I view the above list ranging from misguided to shameful stains on our history. Further I want to draw a distinction between a rating group which certainly encourages censorship but does not have the ability or authority to carry it out and what we are seeing here. The Comics Code Authority worked by voluntary agreement of mainstream distributors and the underground comix scene immediately popped up to challenge it. The Hays code was enabled by a (IMO) bad supreme court decision and after that was overturned quickly crumbled to a more reasonable (again IMO) system of rating. The Parental Advisory labels, despite the intentions of their founders, were reduced to being audio nutritional fact boxes. Any traction they might have got was granted them by distributors like Walmart and collapsed shortly thereafter when the internet changed music distribution.
- xoo1 6y ago> what if they unilaterally decide one day that our business is politically unacceptable because a bad person says nice things about us? HN is extremely ignorant on such matters. But the truth is every hosting provider in the world does this in one way or another, as they all belong to some jurisdiction with some people, organizations, governments having power over them, being able to pressure them, etc. You always had to think about it, just some of us for some services in some countries more so and earlier. Luckily on the tech side and organizational side it's not that hard to protect your service from such primitive soft-power censorship attempts. Torrent sites, political websites, vpn, tor, proxy services, porn, darkweb have been doing this for years very successfully. You just need to be careful about jurisdictions you choose for your domains, registrars, hosting providers and you have to separate hosting providers for internet facing servers from the hosting providers for the backend infrastructure, then host internet facing servers in a bunch of different countries with dns failover and some automated setup of new servers to be able to quickly and painlessly switch and try providers. Obviously backend hosting providers shouldn't be able to deduce what you are hosting there at all and it should at least be hard to deduce for frontend ones, have some decoy stuff ready in case they ask, but encrypt everything, encrypt communications with backends, use proxies or even tor if paranoid they can deduce what you are hosting by IPs you are tunneling to, etc. This way you can even keep using AWS for most things without giving AWS power to boot you, just not for internet facing stuff. And once someone boots you from one of your frontend providers - you just switch to a new one in another country.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- xtracto 6y agoI'm all the way against conservatives ideals but what's happening is scary. It reminds me of news I have heard of other countries where dissidents start losing access to internet and communication channels. I remember it was in Egypt, Iran and Serbia IIRC. Now it appears to be happening in the US, how it woul6happen in the US (corporations instead of the government) Looking at it from outside. It deffinitely looks bad: Imagine if the same thing was happening but to the other side (it would look kind of like The handmaids tale).
- Benjmhart 6y agoIt's almost like you want a free and unfettered press? I thought they were the enemy of the people. You lose twit.