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All I’m going to say is that I’m all for free speech and setting fair rules for everyone to play by (ie regulation), but looking at the examples provided in the

All I’m going to say is that I’m all for free speech and setting fair rules for everyone to play by (ie regulation), but looking at the examples provided in the buzzfeed articles this is beyond simple free speech. I hear a lot of people saying this is just another example of the left trying to shut down free speech but there are clear threats being made on the platform. If Parler doesn’t want to do any content regulation then fine (though this should be any easy place to draw the line), but I can’t blame Amazon for saying “we don’t want that here”.

at_a_remove 6y ago
"... looking at the examples provided in the buzzfeed articles" is another way of saying "I ate the cherry pie made from the cherry-picking by the cherry-pickers." Buzzfeed is about as even-handed as the Norse god Tyr.
- quickthrowman 6y ago
  “Buzzfeed News” and “Buzzfeed” are two distinct and separate organizations, with Buzzfeed News being a serious news-gathering organization.
abarringer 6y ago
oh com'n. As if twitter doesn't allow people to post stupid junk? Multiple accounts that posted "Kill all white women" "Today seems like a good day for another reminder that all republicans deserve to die" are still active along with plenty of other insane things. You can cherry pick bad stuff from any social media site.
- chickenpotpie 6y ago
  Twitter puts an active effort into removing those posts. You can definitely make the case they don’t go far enough, but Parler did the bare minimum. You would have to cherry pick the reasonable content off that site.
  - Karunamon 6y ago
    Mea culpa: I had the completely wrong idea on this post. See down thread. I would delete this comment if I could. Is that why "Hang Mike Pence" was allowed to trend with 14K tweets, and later that same day "Hang Pence" with 55K?[1] I'd wager every penny I own that almost none of those people were banned or sanctioned in any way. [1]: https://twitter.com/yashar/status/1347791913806532609 https://twitter.com/yashar/status/1347791913806532609
    - chickenpotpie 6y ago
      And then Twitter removed it. Could have been faster definitely, but Parler would have never taken it down at all.
    - dagmx 6y ago
      It was brought about because the insurrectionists were shouting that after posts on Parler called for it. Twitter then moderated and banned it. You're really cutting out a ton of context here to fit a narrative. Parler was the source of the posts and parler would not moderate it.
    - NineStarPoint 6y ago
      Not only did twitter end up removing it, but it was a hashtag in response to a video from the protests of people yelling “Hang Mike Pence”, primarily not people actually calling for Mike Pence to be hanged. That I keep seeing this example being thrown around from conservative sources shows either a desire to argue in bad faith or a complete inability to research things beyond the absolute surface level. And it’s not like there aren’t other examples one could use to make reasonable complaints about censorship bias on twitter.
      - Karunamon 6y ago
        Did they actively remove it, or did it just age out of trending like everything does after a relatively short amount of time?
        6y ago
- tantalor 6y ago
  The difference is some sites (Twitter) have policy and infrastructure for moderating spam/abuse, and some (Parler) do not.
  - ketamine__ 6y ago
    According to Parler's CEO the easiest way to get banned is by posting "fuck you" or uploading pictures of poop. That is what he is focused on... Source is Kara Swisher's interview with John Matze.
- narcissismo 6y ago
  It seems like you can see it all now, rather than having to cherry pick. https://cybernews.com/news/70tb-of-parler-users-messages-videos-and-posts-leaked-by-security-researchers/ https://cybernews.com/news/70tb-of-parler-users-messages-vid... I'd be interested in seeing the hate ratio between 70TB of that site's posts versus an equivalent volume of Twitter traffic.
  - creatorbytes 6y ago
    But that puts the burden on who defines hate. Similar to the issue with banning “hate speech”. Where’s the line? We know the extremes, but the extremes aren’t the problem. “Basketball is stupid” - hate speech targeting a minority demographic, thereby racist. I wish the above was hyperbole, but there’s a non-zero group size of people in nearby college communities that would agree.
- arbitrage 6y ago
  ... that's not a counter argument, you realize that, right? Saying things like that shouldn't be sanctioned on twitter, either.
- amyjess 6y ago
  A friend of mine got permanently suspended from twitter because she and a friend were bantering with each other and she made a joking threat. Her friend who the "threat" was directed at has tried to petition twitter to undo her suspension, but they've just ignored her. Twitter regularly bans people for anything that smells of violence, even when the "threat" is one person joking with their friend.
  - mistersquid 6y ago
    > Her friend who the "threat" was directed at has tried to petition twitter to undo her suspension, but they've just ignored her. Can you quote the specific threat issued, anonymized as appropriate?
- tshaddox 6y ago
  Those two examples are likely rhetorical and are (as far as I can tell) not intended to and extremely unlikely to incite violence, much less imminent violence. If there were, however, organized groups actually planning and carrying out killings, and those groups used those slogans as a rallying cry, then indeed people and groups distributing those slogans ought to be banned from social networks.
charly187 6y ago
"looking at the examples provided in the buzzfeed articles" isn't much better than looking at screenshots on facebook.
munificent 6y ago
> I hear a lot of people saying this is just another example of the left trying to shut down free speech This is a specious argument on its face. The First Amendment does not say that private companies are obligated to spend money broadcasting someone else's speech. Hosting and serving isn't free and any private company has the freedom to decide what not to host. If an author's content is so toxic that advertisers won't be associated with it and thus hosts can't or won't afford to host it, that's on the author.
- Closi 6y ago
  > This is a specious argument on its face. The First Amendment does not say that private companies are obligated to spend money broadcasting someone else's speech. Hosting and serving isn't free and any private company has the freedom to decide what not to host. I'm in the UK, but the difference is that right now, these private companies control communication. I'm not allowed outside my house and I live alone. I'm not even allowed outside to go and talk to friends - people are getting fined and arrested for just sitting on a park bench because of the latest lockdown. All my communication with everyone I know is done via private companies. If they lock me out, I'm totally screwed. What is free speech if I can't talk to anyone? Are the phone companies allowed to lock me out if they don't like what I'm saying? So one could argue, that actually if we want free speech in the 21st century, and want to honour the intent of what it means to have free speech, there does need to be some protection here. The protections around freedom of speech were put in at a time where it was inconceivable that a huge majority of worldwide speech could be mass-monitored and auto-censored by a few giant private companies that self-police what can and can't be said - and I think the legislators would have been horrified!
  - mgkimsal 6y ago
    > Are the phone companies allowed to lock me out if they don't like what I'm saying? Possibly, although... you're paying for your phone service. You're not paying for parler, facebook, twitter, etc.
    - Closi 6y ago
sterlind 6y ago
Link to the Buzzfeed article: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/johnpaczkowski/amazon-parler-aws https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/johnpaczkowski/amazon-p... Apparently Amazon sent them 98 examples of posts directly inciting violence, Parler replied with a proposal to manually moderate such posts with volunteers, and most of the posts Amazon gave as examples were still up (including some urging for systematic assassination or blowing up AWS data centers.)
- mgkimsal 6y ago
  Perhaps if Parler had suggested they use mTurk to moderate, AWS might have given them a bit longer? What position would that have put Amazon in, if the moderation was being done via their service, but the end result of the moderation was still 'unacceptable'?
- MisterBiggs 6y ago
  All of those posts barely have any interaction or views so it doesn't seem like they are actually that big of an issue. Every social network has people saying crazy things.
  - jtsiskin 6y ago
    At first I very much agreed with you, all these posts have < 10 'likes', so it seems pretty unfair, as I'm sure you could find the same content on Twitter or Facebook. However reading the exact complaint made me change my mind; they specifically provided them with content which they found to be inciting violence, and Parler took no action on them. If they actually wanted to remove them, at the bare minimum they could have at least removed the ones directly sent to them from their hosting provider. They also have no plan to moderate content themselves. Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, etc all have report buttons which then trigger an employee to review the reported content, and Parler needed to at least say they had plans to do the same.
    - sterlind 6y ago
      exactly! Parler could have a report button with options like "Incitement to violence", "child porn", "other." Send the "other" reports to their manual jury system and have the rest reviewed for legality by staff. they've chosen not to, so they can go burn.
8ytecoder 6y ago
That's exactly I found Elon Musk's and Sam's tweets disappointing. There are very few free speech absolutists who support violence. This is not a case of whether we need moderation or not but rather "was this the right level of moderation". I can't really blame Twitter or even AWS for it. [1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1348688644173934593 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1348688644173934593 [2] https://twitter.com/sama/status/1348699888209461249 https://twitter.com/sama/status/1348699888209461249
baron_harkonnen 6y ago
> the left trying to shut down free speech People really have no idea what the "left" even is anymore do they? I was once down voted here for mentioning that the NYTimes is not an extreme left wing publication. The NYTimes is a centrist liberal publication that is widely reviled by anyone on the left. It's amazing to me that the media (not just Fox-news and co) has constructed this bizarre bogey-man of the left as some control hungry liberals. Those people certainly exist, but they aren't, by anyone who is engage in leftist politics and theory, remotely left. Believe it or not people on the left have been critical of the growing role that corporations have in setting public policy for decades. Sure, centrist liberals my be cheering, but nobody on the left wants to see corporations be the unchecked regulators of society. However, equally surprising to me, is the number of pro-big tech company HN people who are suddenly deeply concerned about unchecked corporate power. People who two weeks ago would claim that companies should drive out employees who disagree with them, now wish these companies were subject to the will of the people. You can't spend a lifetime fighting to reduce the power of the federal government and then be surprised at all that large corporations are the ones deciding our public policy. The entire fact that the will of the people has no direct power over corporate action is exactly why the left doesn't like the perpetual growth of corporate power and of its deregulation. The unfortunate conclusion of all this confusion for me is that this is clearly not political in the slightest. Right-wingers (conservatives haven't existed for decades now) aren't political because they don't have a value system at all. It's just confused rage at a world they don't understand and they feel is crushing them.
- malwrar 6y ago
  > However, equally surprising to me, is the number of pro-big tech company HN people who are suddenly deeply concerned about unchecked corporate power. I think its because the ideal vision of people who like minimal regulation is that they don't really think of mega-rich monoliths that have a direct impact on how an entire country chooses to consume its information. At least for me, I was one one of the annoying "but they're a private business" people until my optics shifted from viewing the issue as someone with an entrepreneurial mindset to someone who sees power concentrating and now being flexed by a small collection of mega-rich monolithic advertising companies that also happen to be collected in the same geopolitical region and possibly have an ideological bias. In other words I reconsidered my principles in light of new information--my posting history here even shows this evolution. FAATG's decisions about how to handle what happened at the Capitol have actually scared the hell out of me, even more so than if the protesters/rioters/insurrectionists had actually succeeded in doing any of the wild shit people keep saying they intended to do. Those companies collectively own the most effective ways to communicate with others as well as almost complete control on the supply chain to create new competitors. I don't want to live in a world where that power exists in the hands of anyone, especially one that is willing to take political action and whose executives and employees vote and donate for one party. > Right-wingers (conservatives haven't existed for decades now) aren't political because they don't have a value system at all. It's just confused rage at a world they don't understand and they feel is crushing them. In the same post you lament people not knowing what the "left" is, you dismiss the right entirely as being comprised of nothing but valueless curmudgeons. This isn't meant to be a personal attack, I just want to point out the bias here in a fairly lazy jab at at least half the US since I've seen it a lot here the last few days. The right (and conservatives) do actually have a more coherent ideological standpoints than you assert, and I suggest digging into what they're saying. It'll be important now more than ever as we in Big Tech figure out how to deal with the massive class of people we've just alienated.
starkd 6y ago
But the prospect of a few powerful tech companies putting their competitors out of business should concern everyone. And there's no reason for such harsh measures.
metiscus 6y ago
Are these platforms prohibited from removing unionization and strike organization activities? My fear is that the labor movement (which is just starting to make significant headway in some of these companies) will be the next targets. If the companies do not have to pay to host hateful content, are there legal protections for labor which may be seen as the next major threat by these companies?
grahamburger 6y ago
The main thing I'm afraid of is that there will be a renewed push to make encryption illegal. Optimistically, I think the actions of these tech companies might help avoid that - if they had done nothing, it would be easier for politicians to demand the ability to take matters in to their own hands.
d33lio 6y ago
I voted for Biden, but I can easily find thousands of examples of "threats" on Twitter coming from far left leaning accounts. Some even from verified accounts. I still love the fact that Twitter banned Anna Kachiyan of the Red Scare podcast, assuming it wasn't a mistake? Companies bowing to play nice with the state is troubling regardless of your politics.
spamizbad 6y ago
What's interesting here is it's not really "the left" trying to shut it down: it's more like "People who believe in the civic religion of the United States" vs people who do not. A ruthlessly self-interested left would benefit tremendously from the successful assassination of Vice President Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi. It would be a galvanizing event that would ultimately turn most of the country against the Republican party. It would likely clear the way for younger, left-leaning Democratic leaders (AOC, Cori Bush), and it would eliminate a major contender for the 2024 presidential race. Biden would enter power with the same level of political capital as George W. Bush after 9/11.
gorgoiler 6y ago
Amazon taking down Parler is some dirty business. The fact that we might be ok with that, pragmatically, doesn’t detract from it being, at best, a morally dubious action. In a state that protects speech, one shouldn’t stand by when default-web-megacorp does the censorship dirty work on our behalf. Or maybe we do. If this is a once in a generation aberration then it can slide. Time will tell.
gairhgfqiu 6y ago
Exactly, they can plan their attacks in a restaurant. But if restaurant owner knows that a group is planning an attack, then owner is held liable.
e40 6y ago
I hear a lot of people saying this is just another example of the left trying to shut down free speech but there are clear threats being made on the platform. That, itself, is propaganda. Here's the elephant in the room: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance Quote: Popper's paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. To my eye, that has been happened since 2016 and DJT took office.
eins1234 6y ago
I totally get why people in the thread are raising the sentiment that free speech is a core tenant of a democractic society that is worth protecting, regardless if you're a private entity or a government. However, democracy itself is actually an exceedingly fragile system, more so than many people realize. We have lived in a golden age for democracy for centuries now, but that actually only represents a tiny blip on the time scale of human existence, which naturally tends towards tyranny. What we need to protect above anything else is the democratic systems and institutions that make free speech even possible at all. And sometimes that means placing restrictions on forms of speech that seek to destroy the very foundations on top of which free speech protections is built upon. Without those limits on free speech, it'd be a very realistic possibility for those who are in fact against free speech to co-opt it to gain enough power to then turn around and abolish it. I think we'd all agree that would be the worst possible outcome, considering all the progress humanity has made on this front.

at_a_remove 6y ago

"... looking at the examples provided in the buzzfeed articles" is another way of saying "I ate the cherry pie made from the cherry-picking by the cherry-pickers." Buzzfeed is about as even-handed as the Norse god Tyr.

quickthrowman 6y ago
“Buzzfeed News” and “Buzzfeed” are two distinct and separate organizations, with Buzzfeed News being a serious news-gathering organization.

abarringer 6y ago

oh com'n. As if twitter doesn't allow people to post stupid junk? Multiple accounts that posted "Kill all white women" "Today seems like a good day for another reminder that all republicans deserve to die" are still active along with plenty of other insane things. You can cherry pick bad stuff from any social media site.

chickenpotpie 6y ago
Twitter puts an active effort into removing those posts. You can definitely make the case they don’t go far enough, but Parler did the bare minimum. You would have to cherry pick the reasonable content off that site.
- Karunamon 6y ago
  Mea culpa: I had the completely wrong idea on this post. See down thread. I would delete this comment if I could. Is that why "Hang Mike Pence" was allowed to trend with 14K tweets, and later that same day "Hang Pence" with 55K?[1] I'd wager every penny I own that almost none of those people were banned or sanctioned in any way. [1]: https://twitter.com/yashar/status/1347791913806532609 https://twitter.com/yashar/status/1347791913806532609
  - chickenpotpie 6y ago
    And then Twitter removed it. Could have been faster definitely, but Parler would have never taken it down at all.
  - dagmx 6y ago
    It was brought about because the insurrectionists were shouting that after posts on Parler called for it. Twitter then moderated and banned it. You're really cutting out a ton of context here to fit a narrative. Parler was the source of the posts and parler would not moderate it.
  - NineStarPoint 6y ago
    Not only did twitter end up removing it, but it was a hashtag in response to a video from the protests of people yelling “Hang Mike Pence”, primarily not people actually calling for Mike Pence to be hanged. That I keep seeing this example being thrown around from conservative sources shows either a desire to argue in bad faith or a complete inability to research things beyond the absolute surface level. And it’s not like there aren’t other examples one could use to make reasonable complaints about censorship bias on twitter.
    - Karunamon 6y ago
      Did they actively remove it, or did it just age out of trending like everything does after a relatively short amount of time?
      - 6y ago
tantalor 6y ago
The difference is some sites (Twitter) have policy and infrastructure for moderating spam/abuse, and some (Parler) do not.
- ketamine__ 6y ago
  According to Parler's CEO the easiest way to get banned is by posting "fuck you" or uploading pictures of poop. That is what he is focused on... Source is Kara Swisher's interview with John Matze.
narcissismo 6y ago
It seems like you can see it all now, rather than having to cherry pick. https://cybernews.com/news/70tb-of-parler-users-messages-videos-and-posts-leaked-by-security-researchers/ https://cybernews.com/news/70tb-of-parler-users-messages-vid... I'd be interested in seeing the hate ratio between 70TB of that site's posts versus an equivalent volume of Twitter traffic.
- creatorbytes 6y ago
  But that puts the burden on who defines hate. Similar to the issue with banning “hate speech”. Where’s the line? We know the extremes, but the extremes aren’t the problem. “Basketball is stupid” - hate speech targeting a minority demographic, thereby racist. I wish the above was hyperbole, but there’s a non-zero group size of people in nearby college communities that would agree.
arbitrage 6y ago
... that's not a counter argument, you realize that, right? Saying things like that shouldn't be sanctioned on twitter, either.
amyjess 6y ago
A friend of mine got permanently suspended from twitter because she and a friend were bantering with each other and she made a joking threat. Her friend who the "threat" was directed at has tried to petition twitter to undo her suspension, but they've just ignored her. Twitter regularly bans people for anything that smells of violence, even when the "threat" is one person joking with their friend.
- mistersquid 6y ago
  > Her friend who the "threat" was directed at has tried to petition twitter to undo her suspension, but they've just ignored her. Can you quote the specific threat issued, anonymized as appropriate?
tshaddox 6y ago
Those two examples are likely rhetorical and are (as far as I can tell) not intended to and extremely unlikely to incite violence, much less imminent violence. If there were, however, organized groups actually planning and carrying out killings, and those groups used those slogans as a rallying cry, then indeed people and groups distributing those slogans ought to be banned from social networks.

charly187 6y ago

"looking at the examples provided in the buzzfeed articles" isn't much better than looking at screenshots on facebook.

munificent 6y ago

> I hear a lot of people saying this is just another example of the left trying to shut down free speech This is a specious argument on its face. The First Amendment does not say that private companies are obligated to spend money broadcasting someone else's speech. Hosting and serving isn't free and any private company has the freedom to decide what not to host. If an author's content is so toxic that advertisers won't be associated with it and thus hosts can't or won't afford to host it, that's on the author.

Closi 6y ago
> This is a specious argument on its face. The First Amendment does not say that private companies are obligated to spend money broadcasting someone else's speech. Hosting and serving isn't free and any private company has the freedom to decide what not to host. I'm in the UK, but the difference is that right now, these private companies control communication. I'm not allowed outside my house and I live alone. I'm not even allowed outside to go and talk to friends - people are getting fined and arrested for just sitting on a park bench because of the latest lockdown. All my communication with everyone I know is done via private companies. If they lock me out, I'm totally screwed. What is free speech if I can't talk to anyone? Are the phone companies allowed to lock me out if they don't like what I'm saying? So one could argue, that actually if we want free speech in the 21st century, and want to honour the intent of what it means to have free speech, there does need to be some protection here. The protections around freedom of speech were put in at a time where it was inconceivable that a huge majority of worldwide speech could be mass-monitored and auto-censored by a few giant private companies that self-police what can and can't be said - and I think the legislators would have been horrified!
- mgkimsal 6y ago
  > Are the phone companies allowed to lock me out if they don't like what I'm saying? Possibly, although... you're paying for your phone service. You're not paying for parler, facebook, twitter, etc.
  - Closi 6y ago

sterlind 6y ago

Link to the Buzzfeed article: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/johnpaczkowski/amazon-parler-aws https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/johnpaczkowski/amazon-p... Apparently Amazon sent them 98 examples of posts directly inciting violence, Parler replied with a proposal to manually moderate such posts with volunteers, and most of the posts Amazon gave as examples were still up (including some urging for systematic assassination or blowing up AWS data centers.)

mgkimsal 6y ago
Perhaps if Parler had suggested they use mTurk to moderate, AWS might have given them a bit longer? What position would that have put Amazon in, if the moderation was being done via their service, but the end result of the moderation was still 'unacceptable'?
MisterBiggs 6y ago
All of those posts barely have any interaction or views so it doesn't seem like they are actually that big of an issue. Every social network has people saying crazy things.
- jtsiskin 6y ago
  At first I very much agreed with you, all these posts have < 10 'likes', so it seems pretty unfair, as I'm sure you could find the same content on Twitter or Facebook. However reading the exact complaint made me change my mind; they specifically provided them with content which they found to be inciting violence, and Parler took no action on them. If they actually wanted to remove them, at the bare minimum they could have at least removed the ones directly sent to them from their hosting provider. They also have no plan to moderate content themselves. Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, etc all have report buttons which then trigger an employee to review the reported content, and Parler needed to at least say they had plans to do the same.
  - sterlind 6y ago
    exactly! Parler could have a report button with options like "Incitement to violence", "child porn", "other." Send the "other" reports to their manual jury system and have the rest reviewed for legality by staff. they've chosen not to, so they can go burn.

8ytecoder 6y ago

That's exactly I found Elon Musk's and Sam's tweets disappointing. There are very few free speech absolutists who support violence. This is not a case of whether we need moderation or not but rather "was this the right level of moderation". I can't really blame Twitter or even AWS for it. [1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1348688644173934593 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1348688644173934593 [2] https://twitter.com/sama/status/1348699888209461249 https://twitter.com/sama/status/1348699888209461249

baron_harkonnen 6y ago

> the left trying to shut down free speech People really have no idea what the "left" even is anymore do they? I was once down voted here for mentioning that the NYTimes is not an extreme left wing publication. The NYTimes is a centrist liberal publication that is widely reviled by anyone on the left. It's amazing to me that the media (not just Fox-news and co) has constructed this bizarre bogey-man of the left as some control hungry liberals. Those people certainly exist, but they aren't, by anyone who is engage in leftist politics and theory, remotely left. Believe it or not people on the left have been critical of the growing role that corporations have in setting public policy for decades. Sure, centrist liberals my be cheering, but nobody on the left wants to see corporations be the unchecked regulators of society. However, equally surprising to me, is the number of pro-big tech company HN people who are suddenly deeply concerned about unchecked corporate power. People who two weeks ago would claim that companies should drive out employees who disagree with them, now wish these companies were subject to the will of the people. You can't spend a lifetime fighting to reduce the power of the federal government and then be surprised at all that large corporations are the ones deciding our public policy. The entire fact that the will of the people has no direct power over corporate action is exactly why the left doesn't like the perpetual growth of corporate power and of its deregulation. The unfortunate conclusion of all this confusion for me is that this is clearly not political in the slightest. Right-wingers (conservatives haven't existed for decades now) aren't political because they don't have a value system at all. It's just confused rage at a world they don't understand and they feel is crushing them.

malwrar 6y ago
> However, equally surprising to me, is the number of pro-big tech company HN people who are suddenly deeply concerned about unchecked corporate power. I think its because the ideal vision of people who like minimal regulation is that they don't really think of mega-rich monoliths that have a direct impact on how an entire country chooses to consume its information. At least for me, I was one one of the annoying "but they're a private business" people until my optics shifted from viewing the issue as someone with an entrepreneurial mindset to someone who sees power concentrating and now being flexed by a small collection of mega-rich monolithic advertising companies that also happen to be collected in the same geopolitical region and possibly have an ideological bias. In other words I reconsidered my principles in light of new information--my posting history here even shows this evolution. FAATG's decisions about how to handle what happened at the Capitol have actually scared the hell out of me, even more so than if the protesters/rioters/insurrectionists had actually succeeded in doing any of the wild shit people keep saying they intended to do. Those companies collectively own the most effective ways to communicate with others as well as almost complete control on the supply chain to create new competitors. I don't want to live in a world where that power exists in the hands of anyone, especially one that is willing to take political action and whose executives and employees vote and donate for one party. > Right-wingers (conservatives haven't existed for decades now) aren't political because they don't have a value system at all. It's just confused rage at a world they don't understand and they feel is crushing them. In the same post you lament people not knowing what the "left" is, you dismiss the right entirely as being comprised of nothing but valueless curmudgeons. This isn't meant to be a personal attack, I just want to point out the bias here in a fairly lazy jab at at least half the US since I've seen it a lot here the last few days. The right (and conservatives) do actually have a more coherent ideological standpoints than you assert, and I suggest digging into what they're saying. It'll be important now more than ever as we in Big Tech figure out how to deal with the massive class of people we've just alienated.

starkd 6y ago

But the prospect of a few powerful tech companies putting their competitors out of business should concern everyone. And there's no reason for such harsh measures.

metiscus 6y ago

Are these platforms prohibited from removing unionization and strike organization activities? My fear is that the labor movement (which is just starting to make significant headway in some of these companies) will be the next targets. If the companies do not have to pay to host hateful content, are there legal protections for labor which may be seen as the next major threat by these companies?

grahamburger 6y ago

The main thing I'm afraid of is that there will be a renewed push to make encryption illegal. Optimistically, I think the actions of these tech companies might help avoid that - if they had done nothing, it would be easier for politicians to demand the ability to take matters in to their own hands.

d33lio 6y ago

I voted for Biden, but I can easily find thousands of examples of "threats" on Twitter coming from far left leaning accounts. Some even from verified accounts. I still love the fact that Twitter banned Anna Kachiyan of the Red Scare podcast, assuming it wasn't a mistake? Companies bowing to play nice with the state is troubling regardless of your politics.

spamizbad 6y ago

What's interesting here is it's not really "the left" trying to shut it down: it's more like "People who believe in the civic religion of the United States" vs people who do not. A ruthlessly self-interested left would benefit tremendously from the successful assassination of Vice President Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi. It would be a galvanizing event that would ultimately turn most of the country against the Republican party. It would likely clear the way for younger, left-leaning Democratic leaders (AOC, Cori Bush), and it would eliminate a major contender for the 2024 presidential race. Biden would enter power with the same level of political capital as George W. Bush after 9/11.

gorgoiler 6y ago

Amazon taking down Parler is some dirty business. The fact that we might be ok with that, pragmatically, doesn’t detract from it being, at best, a morally dubious action. In a state that protects speech, one shouldn’t stand by when default-web-megacorp does the censorship dirty work on our behalf. Or maybe we do. If this is a once in a generation aberration then it can slide. Time will tell.

gairhgfqiu 6y ago

Exactly, they can plan their attacks in a restaurant. But if restaurant owner knows that a group is planning an attack, then owner is held liable.

e40 6y ago

I hear a lot of people saying this is just another example of the left trying to shut down free speech but there are clear threats being made on the platform. That, itself, is propaganda. Here's the elephant in the room: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance Quote: Popper's paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. To my eye, that has been happened since 2016 and DJT took office.

eins1234 6y ago

I totally get why people in the thread are raising the sentiment that free speech is a core tenant of a democractic society that is worth protecting, regardless if you're a private entity or a government. However, democracy itself is actually an exceedingly fragile system, more so than many people realize. We have lived in a golden age for democracy for centuries now, but that actually only represents a tiny blip on the time scale of human existence, which naturally tends towards tyranny. What we need to protect above anything else is the democratic systems and institutions that make free speech even possible at all. And sometimes that means placing restrictions on forms of speech that seek to destroy the very foundations on top of which free speech protections is built upon. Without those limits on free speech, it'd be a very realistic possibility for those who are in fact against free speech to co-opt it to gain enough power to then turn around and abolish it. I think we'd all agree that would be the worst possible outcome, considering all the progress humanity has made on this front.