28 ms·

I'm having a real hard time understanding how all the comments in the thread are in favor of this. I mean, even if you disagree with the idea of Parler, how ca

• JumpCrisscross 6y ago
  Free speech versus freedom of assembly. This is their collision. We resolve this by creating protected classes, a concept much of the Parler user base opposes on the grounds of religious freedom. Forcing people and groups of people to associate with those they abhor is also tyrannically tainted.
  • j8hn 6y ago
    I'm trying to understand what you are saying. Much of the Parler user base opposes associating with certain groups of protected classes?
    • JumpCrisscross 6y ago
      We force e.g. racist bakers to sell to black people. Outside protected classes, however, we do not force Apple or Google to associate with Parler. Political affiliation is not a protected class. That’s freedom of assembly.
      • j8hn 6y ago
        I'm still trying to understand. Freedom of speech should only apply to protected classes?
• xapata 6y ago
  It's private action, not government action. That's a big difference.
  • Proven 6y ago
    Correct. I'm very much against what they did, but I think they have the right to do it. What is more concerning is how they deplatformed Parler in a perfectly coordinated manner.
• dragontamer 6y ago
  > I mean, even if you disagree with the idea of Parler, how can one willingly support this kind of censorship? The events of Wednesday of last week changed my mind. > "First they came for the XYZ and I didn't care because I wans't XYZ, then they came for the ..., and then they came for me, and there was no one left to stop them from getting me" First Wikipedia banned Church of Scientology, and no one really cared. Then 4chan booted Gamergate, and no one really cared. Then Cloudflare booted Daily Stormer, and no one really cared. Then AWS / Apple / Google booted Parlor. And you know? Its not really nearly as bad as you think. We have real life examples. You don't have to talk about hypotheticals, choose a real life example. Like, do you really think Parlor deserves a platform if the community is continuing to plot assassination attempts vs Mike Pence and attacks on the Inauguration over the next two weeks? Instead of arguing in the abstract, how about you argue with what's going on this week.
  • oliv__ 6y ago
    Yes, I do. That's like saying you want to ban phones because people use them to plot terrorist attacks.
    • dragontamer 6y ago
      Your comment is unhelpful, abstracct, and too hyperbolic for the purposes of this discussion. Stick with reality. I dare you to defend Parlor. Or, if you don't like Parlor, we have a myriad of other deplatformings (Gamergate/4Chan, Church of Scientology/Wikipedia, and Daily Stormer / Cloudflare) you can discuss instead. IMO, you want to run away to an imaginary world where the events of last Wednesday do not matter. Some pretend argument where people are taking away all cell phones (or something similarly unrealistic...). I'm not going to let you. At a bare minimum, you need to choose a realistic example from reality before I can take you seriously. Lets be real, lets stay real. Lets use actual, reality-based arguments and discussions.
      • j8hn 6y ago
        You're commenting is very uncivil and doesn't belong here.
• tshaddox 6y ago
  Kinda weird to repurpose that example when here it’s literally “first they came for the Nazis.”
• yantrams 6y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance The paradox of tolerance states that if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually seized or destroyed by the intolerant. Karl Popper described it as the seemingly paradoxical idea that in order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must be intolerant of intolerance.
  • bitlax 6y ago
    Yeah I've seen people throwing that around for the last few years and obviously it's going really well.
    • johndevor 6y ago
      I will not tolerate your sarcasm... Out of tolerance.
    • ramraj07 6y ago
      You're being sarcastic because you're implying it isn't going well. It's true, the situation is not going well at all, but the consensus seems to be that it's mainly -because- Facebook and Twitter never banned these voices for a long time as they should have (and ostensibly they didn't ban mainly because of bottom line)
      • s__s 6y ago
        Do Amazon, Facebook, or Google get held accountable for what random users post on their platforms / services / servers? No. Why are they holding Parler to a different standard?
        • diveanon 6y ago
          It's because they see that they will be held accountable if they don't start policing themselves. They should have started doing this 4 years ago, then maybe we wouldn't have witnessed the first coup attempt in our history and 350k people wouldn't have died from a preventable illness.
• courtf 6y ago
  Because no one is "coming" for you friend. You sound deranged. If you really need a place to scream about killing leftists, go to the park. The homeless vets will probably yell at you to shut up but I promise Amazon won't try to deplatform you.
  • dang 6y ago
    (Sorry for the delay but I've been swamped since this conflagration.) Posts like this one are totally unacceptable on HN, regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are—and you posted a ton of these. We ban this sort of account, regardless of which politics they're battling for. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here. Your recent posts have been using HN primarily for political battle. Please don't do that—it's against the guidelines and it's the line across which we start banning accounts (https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0&query=primarily%20test%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...), again regardless of which politics they're battling for. The reason is that it basically destroys what HN is supposed to exist for, which is curious conversation on a wide range of topics.
• paxys 6y ago
  There are threads on Parler right now (well, were before the service was taken down I guess) where people are discussing names and addresses of Twitter employees and planning kidnappings. You really think taking that down is censorship?
  • JarlUlvi 6y ago
    That sounds like a crime for the FBI, and local law enforcement to handle, not the Outrage Cancel Culture mob. In fact, if you think about it, we'd want them discussing these things in an easy to find place so they could be lawfully surveilled, evidence gathered, and then handled through the legal process. However, this is really not about that. It is really about a purge of politically unpopular people.
  • j8hn 6y ago
    I'm not familiar with Parler. I tried to read some comments from different posts and wasn't able. Do you have to have an account to read comments?
  • ehsankia 6y ago
    I wonder if these people also consider banning child porn censorship. Or removing ISIS recruitment videos. Where's the line? Should absolutely everything be allowed? Should someone recruiting people to attack the Capitol be allowed too? Or doxxing Twitter employees as you mention? Clearly a line exists somewhere as my first two examples, I'd hope most people would be okay with those being taken down, but somehow this line is not okay?
    • three_seagrass 6y ago
      >Where's the line? Harm. When the expression of speech causes harm, then the line is drawn. This is the general interpretation ranging from SCOTUS to free speech philosophers like John Stuart Mill.
    • rocqua 6y ago
      Thing is, if we give up on these people like this, we help radicalize them. This is a platform that was created specifically for people that were kicked out. If we keep taking their platform they will keep getting angrier. If there is a solution to this, it involves empathy and honest engagement. Not banning and blocking, at least not of the rank and file people.
• onion2k 6y ago
  It isn't censorship. No one is telling Parler they're not free to do what they want. AWS is telling Parler they don't want them as a customer. That is not censorship. Whether a business should be able to refuse a customer is an interesting question. People on the political right have historically believed they should (refusing to make a wedding cake for a gay couple is often cited as a case of such freedom). There is also an argument that AWS is now so big and important that they should be treated like a utility, and then refusing customers is something that they shouldn't necessarily be allowed to do. I'm not sure how I feel about that argument though.
  • techfoolery 6y ago
    The day big tech companies learned that democrats would chair all the congressional committees that oversee them, these kinds of actions started happening. If that doesn't concern you, I don't know what to tell you.
    • spacemanmatt 6y ago
      It is entirely telling what they could get away with under Republicans.
    • dagmx 6y ago
      It's also the day there was an insurrection/invasion of the capitol to prevent the Democratic process. This was fueled by the unfettered calls to violence on Parler. If you're going to pick the events of the day, it's best to mention both.
      • throwaway201103 6y ago
        After a summer of riots, looting, and violence all across the country, fueled by calls to violence on Twitter and Facebook
        • dagmx 6y ago
          What calls for violence, that weren't moderated? What organized looting? What riots that weren't instigated by police brutality? Did any of these try and overthrow the Democratic process? Please provide examples or you're just providing false equivalencies and whataboutism.
• hprotagonist 6y ago
  >"First they came for the XYZ ... The author's life story is instructive here as to how misused this particular trope is in this example. Martin Niemoller voted for Hitler. Twice! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Niem%C3%B6ller https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Niem%C3%B6ller
• kumarvvr 6y ago
  What is stopping them from buying a server and hosting their site on thei own server? Nothing. Except laws against hate speech.
  • CamperBob2 6y ago
    Which don't exist in the US.
    • kumarvvr 6y ago
      https://www.siteuptime.com/blog/2019/12/19/how-to-create-your-own-server-at-home-for-web-hosting/ https://www.siteuptime.com/blog/2019/12/19/how-to-create-you...
• tayo42 6y ago
  It's fear mongering to bring up this "first they came for" stuff. It reads like a slippery slop fallacy, these are also unusual circumstances.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • Nathanba 6y ago
    you are using buzzwords, everything is fear mongering if you fear it. Everything is some kind of fallacy. Make better arguments.
    • sdwa 6y ago
      But that person is right. Most of the arguments against private companies banning companies/individuals violating their ToS boil down to something along the lines of "this is a slippery slope, we're on our way to tyranny". But all European countries have limits on free speech and the vast majority are free countries, so all of these arguments are demonstrably false. We don't even have to look to other countries for examples, there has been censorship of various kinds at various times in the US since its founding, and yet there was no inevitable slide to Orwellian tyranny after each instance. The problem is that Americans are far too paranoid—every little thing is perceived an existential threat to you people.
    • tayo42 6y ago
      Private companies are distancing them selves from violent groups. So the next logical step is systematic persecution and censorship of other minority groups?
• CitizenKane 6y ago
  I'm going to take a guess that you've not lived under an actual regime of censorship. This is not it, and quite honestly basically all speech which threatens others is restricted. There are always limits, and just because other crossed them does not necessarily mean that restrictions are going to tighten further.
  • foepys 6y ago
    It's extremely interesting how EU countries nearly all have different kinds of restrictions on free speech (or don't even have it) but nobody would go out and label Germany or France as anything different than liberal democracies. Meanwhile to many here private companies banning Parler apparently equals Chinese-level censorship. In Germany Parler would have been banned months ago for "Volksverhetzung" ("incitement of the masses") because Germany knows what happens when you let right- or left-wing extremists indoctrinate the masses.
  • concordDance 6y ago
    Might you only be thinking this isn't a censorsous because your thoughts aren't the ones being censored?
• RobLach 6y ago
  AWS is not a service provided by the state.
• bigtiger 6y ago
  I support "this kind of censorship" because I'm not an extremist and don't like extremism, especially the violent kind. I hope even the ISPs get involved if that's what it takes to prevent an insurrection from any expression of extremism. I may reconsider this position if they ever "come for me"; but frankly, for now, I value stability and longevity for our nation more than its abstract ideals about freedom of speech.
  • oliv__ 6y ago
    > I may reconsider this position if they ever "come for me"; but frankly, for now, I value stability and longevity for our nation more than its abstract ideals about freedom of speech. By then it's too late, that's kind of the point of that poem.
  • aluminum96 6y ago
    Upvote for this. Sometimes, we have to put away our abstract ideals and concede that, although there may not be a "bright line" at which censorship becomes acceptable, the incitement this week crossed it nonetheless.
  • franklampard 6y ago
    100% They were literally threatening to kill Twitter employees and elected officials. How on Earth should anyone defend that as free speech.
  • Rapzid 6y ago
    A conservative viewpoint.. I feel I'm still a bit(just a tad) more risk tolerant than this, but I do empathize with this viewpoint. Basically; call me when there is a real problem, 'cause this ain't it.
• conception 6y ago
  No one was up in arms when Twitter removed 125k Isis accounts. Deplatforming terrorists, and if you think there aren’t there then you willfully ignorant of what’s going on on that platform, is a legitimate action for any private citizen or company to undertake. This isn’t state censorship in any way. Ignoring your TOS and not moderating terrorists is complicit action by the owners to get ahead of “but they aren’t all terrorists!”
  • franklampard 6y ago
    Good point. If ISIS made an App to communicate and organize, nobody will have a problem for it to be immediately removed.
    • jswifty1 6y ago
      Yet telegram wasn’t, and that’s exactly what they were doing.
    • ttoomm28 6y ago
      Whatsapp ?
  • ttoomm28 6y ago
    By the same logic used to bring down Parlor, Twitter itself should be shut down
• x86_64Ubuntu 6y ago
  It's not censorship in the least. The government isn't chasing them because of stuff they said. And it's weird that you are using a quote that was coined with respect to the Nazi period, in defense of a group where members are wearing shirts saying "Camp Auschwitz".
• r0s 6y ago
  How is it hard to understand that private companies can set their own terms of use? I'm having a real hard time understanding how anyone, especially business people can misunderstand this. Simple: It's not censorship.
  • rocqua 6y ago
    Weird thing is the current 'public forum', i.e. the place where debate is had, is fully run by private companies. The fact that access to the public forum these days requires abiding by a ToS enforced by a private, no-apeal process is bad.
    • sdwa 6y ago
      The simple truth is that these knuckle-draggers plotting for Mike Pence to be executed by firing squad would have at every point in the past never been able to reach a "public forum" of any kind. For all the complaints that we need to engage positively with such wonderfully civil discourse, it's only by virtue of the internet that they're being heard at all. Society previously was very good at ignoring these people, and society was healthier for it.
    • r0s 6y ago
      > the place where debate is had. No, it's not. Social media is more like a small printing press that will print anyone's little pamphlet. It may be new but it was never the only venue and never will be. And, there must be some types of moderation to all speech, all.
      • rocqua 6y ago
        > And, there must be some types of moderation to all speech, all. There definitely needs to be moderation. But having the power to moderate speech on such a significant platform in the hands of 3 private parties is bad. Not that I think their recent decisions are wrong. But the lack of recourse is scary, and dangerous. Not just dangerous because 'what if they abuse it'. It is dangerous because people censored by them are much more likely to feel that it _is_ abuse. Hence they don't take the signal and instead have a massive sense of injustice. "How can a decision so big, without appeal being possible, be fair" they think. > Social media is more like a small printing press that will print anyone's little pamphlet. It may be new but it was never the only venue and never will be. Social media is the sole source of news and discussion for a lot of people. Sure, there are alternatives, but they fail to reach a large amount of people.
• ookblah 6y ago
  because they are a platform that tends to host the type of people that actively plot to overthrow our gov't? lol i don't understand where this intellectual both sides type argument comes from. they literally do not pass the sniff test in any measure. there is no slippery slope here. millions of more "rational" conservatives are absolutely fine and are not being banned. if this purges all the loony bin q-anon and conspiracy theory stuff then i'm for it. you can make that argument if it stays in discussion land, but as we've seen, it actually boiled into violence against the state.
• throwawaysea 6y ago
  This also raises another question. Facebook has much more problematic content in an absolute sense than Parler does, even if they have better moderation. After all, they have a far larger userbase. Parler may have a higher amount of problematic content as a percentage of all its content, but Facebook still has a large total impact. So why is their app still available? The article that is linked here in the NY Times (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/09/technology/apple-google-parler.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/09/technology/apple-google-p...) states examples of Parler deleting content encouraging violence. So it's not as if Parler is doing zero moderation. But it is clear that Facebook and Twitter are not perfect (or even consistent) in their moderation. So where's the threshold for when the unmoderated posts cause you to get deplatformed? That line seems arbitrary to me. It also seems like an unfair line since Parler has only 30 employees. If the response to censorship is "go build your own social network", then surely there needs to be allowance for small social networks that face a sudden influx of new users and traffic. Most users of Parler, and most content, is not problematic. The same question should be asked when it comes to Twitter banning Trump's account. Twitter's own blog post (https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/suspension.html https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/suspensio...) does not make a great case for proving Trump was inciting violence - certainly none of the quoted info (like Trump choosing to skip the inauguration) would pass the bar necessary for a court to prove incitement. But a more basic issue here is that the vast majority of those who turned up in DC to support Trump and see him speak did not participate in the riot. Per various sources (example https://www.localdvm.com/news/washington-dc/three-demonstrations-permitted-by-national-park-service-for-week-of-january-4/ https://www.localdvm.com/news/washington-dc/three-demonstrat...) there were tens of thousands of attendees to the recent DC marches, across several fully-legal fully-permitted events. Out of all that, a few hundred raided the capitol. So if a small percentage of your followers engage in criminal activity, is that cause for a ban? And if that is the case, why wouldn't the same apply to other politicians or activists or social media figures? Why do BLM-affiliated events get a pass, with the criminal elements written off as a small fringe?
  • disgruntledphd2 6y ago
    > Why do BLM-affiliated events get a pass, with the criminal elements written off as a small fringe? I suspect that this has something to do with the fact that the President of the United States incited a riot rather than it being something that happened along with the protest.
• CyanLite4 6y ago
  It’s not censorship when people are planning to overthrow the government and planning mass-murder. Sure, sharing weird QAnon memes and Trump worship... I don’t care. That’s the equivalent of Fox News. But using it as a base of communication to overtly threaten to kill members of government (even ones I didn’t vote for) is crossing the line. From the article, there were hundreds if not thousands of users posting plans to regroup and bring guns and bombs to the Capitol with definite coordination between them all. It’s no longer a free-speech issue.
• jliptzin 6y ago
  Anyone is free to set up a computer in their basement, install a web server, open up port 80 to the world, and serve to the world whatever blog or forum they want. This is the beauty of the web. They can scale it up as traffic grows and deal with all those headaches if they want. I fully support the owners of Parler if they want to do this. Twitter, FB, AWS, Google eventually came along and said “ok, you want to share your ideas or host a community, we can make that really easy with our tools and platforms!” You can post what you want without worrying about servers in your basement. But in exchange for that convenience you have to accept that they reserve the right to terminate the contract at any time. They should not be required to help you promote ideas that they deem harmful or toxic. So Parler can go back to how we used to do things in the 90s...it’s a little harder but not that hard. No one is being censored. This is simply a few companies deciding to terminate a relationship with one of their clients.
  • birdybird 6y ago
    This is quite dishonest. Twitter, FB, AWS, Google condone a constant stream of harmful material, as long as it is either coming from other tech oligarchs or non-conservative outlets. How many BLM / Antifa riots have been organized in Google drive or Gmail? How many inner city gang feuds have spilled over into bloodshed, as a result of Instagram, Twitter or Facebook? How much revenge porn is served on Amazon's CDNs? Since George Floyd died, homicide rates have exploded in the United States -- dwarfing anything the far-right has done. To pretend this is about stopping violence is just a lie.
  • ffggvv 6y ago
    “people can simply drive, i fully support american airlines not letting group X use their airlines” “people can just send letters i fully support att not allowing group X to use their phone lines to spread info.”
    • nodamage 6y ago
      This is not the gotcha you think it is. Multiple airlines, for example, have banned passengers from their flights for refusing to wear masks. They are well within their rights to do so.
• trianglem 6y ago
  First the came for the fascists and we didn’t say anything... and then they stopped because having more people on their platform is actually good for business. It actually a pretty well balanced situation from a game theory perspective.
• one2know 6y ago
  They are scared. scared shitless.
• bananamerica 6y ago
  I take issue with the indiscriminate use of the word “censorship”. If a newspaper of a certain inclination only gives space for those that are aligned to its tendencies, no one calls that censorship. Private companies moderate and editorialize. That’s their prerogative. Governments employ censorship.
  • SV_BubbleTime 6y ago
    I think your point would be stronger if there was only one newspaper (Twitter) and the someone said “if you don’t like it, make your own newspaper (Parler)”... and then they banned your new newspaper. Ignoring the monopoly aspect of this conversation is unhelpful.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• esoterica 6y ago
  Your free speech rights don’t extend to other people’s property. You can say whatever you want but you can’t force other people to host your speech against their will.
• rocqua 6y ago
  I agree with you. But I think people just want action taken after what happened in the capitol. Empathy for these rioters has gone out the window.
• concordDance 6y ago
  They're pretty sure they'll always be on the right side of history.
• ashtonkem 6y ago
  “First they came for those that tried to lynch members of congress”. Yeah, I’m fine with this. You aren’t?
• erikpukinskis 6y ago
  So how would you write the law that forces me to leave up a post on my site? If someone posts "Hang Mike Pence" on Erik's Bakeshop Blog in the comments, would you have a law that says I have to leave it up? What if it's Erik's Bakeshop Blog Network, Home of All Ten of the Most Popular Bakeshop Blogs? Anyone who is Anyone in the Bakeshop Community has a Presence on the EBB Network. Would you then require me to keep those comments up? Because not having access to the EBBN is professional suicide for a bakeshop professional? Because I'm "ruining lives"? How do you write that law? Or can I take them down, but I have to continue to allow MagaBakerBabe post, and I am just required to spend money paying content moderators to monitor what they are posting? I am genuinely curious, from a legal perspective, what is the alternative to "Corporations are allowed to ban people for whatever reason they like, except membership to a protected class"? Or are we not talking about laws at all, are we saying Google is free to ban whoever they like, but it's Bad, and we're just issuing a strongly worded rebuke here, and we would prefer that anyone with a Blog Network considers the free speech implications of deplatforming users like MagaBakerBabe?
• slcjordan 6y ago
  At the very least, every company hosted on AWS should be evaluating whether they are liberal enough to stay in Amazon's good graces.