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> 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 Ame

> 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
    Parler were paying for AWS.
- GrinningFool 6y ago
  > censored by a few giant private companies that self-police what can and can't be said But you have to keep in mind the other side of that - the protections around freedom of speech were put in place at a time when it was inconceivable that a majority of people in the country had the ability to be seen and heard _by the majority of other people in the country_. In near real-time, anytime. And that they could do so in a way that meant often they did not have to accept any consequence for the wider-ranging effects of their words. Separately I also have to wonder if the knowledge acquired as a result of that would have affected their framing. In particular the advances in psychology and group psychology, and in understanding how it's possible to use this instant mass communication to manipulate even people who are on guard against manipulation.
- epistasis 6y ago
  If these companies are "shutting you down" for your speech, it's the same sort of speech that would have gotten you shut down in the public square. Have they shut down text messaging, phone calls, group messaging, all the encrypted messaging apps? Do the tech companies control postal mail, letters to the editor, and printing presses? Of course not. You are looking for others to give you a platform to reach a wide audience. There are many. But no platform requires people to publish you. You have lost being able to yell in a public square, temporarily, due to public safety, but you haven't lost the ability to transmit speech that would have been acceptable in the public square. So so so tired of these false equivalencies, and an unwillingness to engage with the type of speech that results in this. Normal, political speech is just fine. Incitement to violence, no. Hell, AWS still hosts the publication that posted Bezos' dick pics! These shutdowns are not some sort of political censorship, these shutdowns are the natural result of speech that societies have determined not to be free.
  - StanislavPetrov 6y ago
    >If these companies are "shutting you down" for your speech, it's the same sort of speech that would have gotten you shut down in the public square. That's completely absurd. Tens of thousands of people are silenced by corporations every day for speech that is considered offensive by one metric or another, but is by no means illegal. An associate of mine was permanently banned for, "deadnaming" someone else. Certainly very offensive according certain standards but hardly something that you wouldn't be allowed to say in the public park. You can reasonably argue about the right of private corporations to choose to do business with who they want, but you cannot reasonably argue that people are only being silenced for explicitly illegal behavior that would also be illegal offline.
    - vkou 6y ago
      If I get banned from HN for violating it's ToS (By, say, personally attacking people, or posting links to pornography, or just engaging in insane off-topic ramblings), can I also describe that as being silenced for my beliefs? Despite retaining access to hundreds of unmoderated channels by which I can communicate?
- 8note 6y ago
  You can send a letter in the mail, can't you?
  - Closi 6y ago
    Oh great, that totally resolves the dystopian nightmare we might be heading for!
    - scsilver 6y ago
      I mean, the UK is still has vestigial Monarchal components as opposed to the US constitution which was built from the ground up with severe limits and federation of power. We'd likely see that distopia in england long before the US justice system can adjust itself to allow it.
- crazydoggers 6y ago
  The difference with the phone companies is you’re talking one on one communication. Not a publishing platform which is what these social media services really are. You can always use text, signal, etc if you want to communicate with your group. These are the same kinds of issues society dealt with, with the advent of radio and television, platforms that allowed small groups to reach out to very large groups of people with minimal effort. Most countries have something like the FCC that regulates those platforms. Not only is it not permitted to incite violence in tv, even gross displays of real violence are censored, and even offensive speech. (For instance swearing). Now we can have debates about the degree of that censorship, but the topics of free speech and first amendment rights have largely been settled. If companies don’t self censor stuff that clearly 99% of society doesn’t like, then you’re going to see someone like the FCC or other government agencies step in. So what would you rather. If someone like Parler or Gab wants to exists, they are free to at the moment, and they are also free to speak anything they want to whom ever they want. They just don’t get to force other people to support them in the process. Coming from a family who’s relatives escaped from places which had true censorship, lack of any first amendment rights, the entitlement, and disconnect from reality in these arguments bothers me. You do not have a protected right to a mass publication forum. That is not a first amendment right. You do have the right to establish such a platform if you wish to. But just like you had to buy you’re own printing press, you’ll have to buy your own internet infrastructure. And I and other groups of citizens (including companies made up of those citizens) also have a right not to listen to you and to throw your pamphlets in the trash. And as a society, we have a right to limit free speech when it is very clearly only about hate and violence. You don’t get to call my house and tell me you’ll kill me for instance. “ Under state criminal codes, which vary by state, it is an offense to knowingly utter or convey a threat to cause death or bodily harm to any person. It is also an offense to threaten to burn, destroy or damage property or threaten to kill, poison or injure an animal or bird that belongs to a person.”
  - a_band 6y ago
    > You can always use text, signal, etc if you want to communicate with your group. Does Signal run on AWS? If I can shut you down at the cloud level then I'm not sure these options will be available in the future. Someone is going to coordinate a protest/riot on Signal, screenshots will leak, then what happens?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- munificent 6y ago
  > these private companies control communication. I think verbs are important. Another way to say this is that these companies enable or provide communication. Imagine that COVID-19 had hit in the 80s before we had all of this. It would have been miserable, isolating, tragic. But would it make sense to blame the tech companies we have now for not existing then? Would it have been someone's fault? > All my communication with everyone I know is done via private companies. Another way to frame that is just to be thankful that those companies are there to enable that communication. That, of course, doesn't mean they are free from moral consequences or anything. But we are only beholden to them because they are providing us so much value. > 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 It was also authored in a time where "broadcasting" meant literally printing copies of pamphlets and physically depositing them in every town square you wanted to reach. I don't know if we have any clue how the Founding Fathers of the US would have interpreted today's communication systems. I think we need principles that are designed for the structures we do have without necessarily assuming any at-the-time-excellent principle from the 1700s must be directly mapped to today's needs.
  - Closi 6y ago
    “Control communication” is intentional - Content is scanned to understand intent, promoted/demoted based on an invisible algorithm, and your communication can be labelled or shut down if you have a dissenting opinion. In-between your conversation political adverts are inserted, specifically tailored to your demographic data and personality profile (and rather than encouraging you to vote for the party, they are actually designed to disenfranchise you and make you not vote for anyone). This isn’t a future dystopia - this all already happens on Facebook. And that’s why this involves a level of control over being a neutral communication channel. > Another way to frame that is just to be thankful that those companies are there to enable that communication. Yes be thankful to mega corp. mega corp good. Mega corp has our interests at its heart.
emtel 6y ago
Free speech and the First Amendment are not the same thing. Free speech is a moral principle/ideal that exists independently of the US Constitution. The First Amendment guarantees a certain form of free speech in the United States. Private-sector censorship / restriction of speech is not in violation of the First Amendment. However, it may still amount to a restriction on free speech.
- munificent 6y ago
  Fair, but in this case we're talking about a US company hosting another US company's data, so I think talking about free speech in the context of the First Amendment is reasonable.
  - emtel 6y ago
    It's not unreasonable, but I think it's incomplete. We may be headed towards a world in which private companies exert a great deal of control over what an individual can say. Not only by controlling communication platforms, but also by withholding employment from people who say certain things. I don't want to join the argument about whether that's good or bad, but I think it's a huge mistake to simply say "It's consistent with the 1st amendment, therefore it's OK." If we're going to let private corporations use their market power to police individual speech, we need to have a real debate about what that means.
  - inglor_cz 6y ago
    The distinction between private and public sphere is not completely clear. Let us say that a politician calls Mark Zuckerberg and asks him nicely to squish certain people, and MZ complies. Is that a First Amendment issue or not? Or, let us say that a politician calls Mark Zuckerberg and offers him some concrete support (in an anti-trust case or taxation matters) for squishing certain people, and MZ takes up the offer. Is that a First Amendment issue or not? The trouble with both scenarios is that they are certainly possible and hard to prove or disprove. That is one of the reasons why concentration of power in a few hands (even private ones) may translate into bad politics.
jorblumesea 6y ago
I don't think the people that end up on Parler have a strong grasp of constitutional law (no offense to anyone that does and uses app). The general people that end up on that app are hardcore trending extremist and you're not going to find intelligent debate on the role of private companies and the government. It's probably closer to propaganda than it is a true social media site.
- trident5000 6y ago
  There are plenty of extremists on Twitter and Facebook. Thats where the double standard is. People organized on twitter when they stormed the white house and the pres went into a bunker as an example. Facebook is accused of much worse in foreign countries currently. The reason Parler was banned is because all these corporations are very aware they are under the anti-trust microscope. This was a favor to the new party in power in hopes of getting something back.
  - jorblumesea 6y ago
    While I absolutely agree with the idea that every social media has extremes, I completely disagree with the end conclusions. Other social media services do not actively shape the debate through intense political moderation. There's no "Post tsar" the validates the political health of things that people host. Meanwhile on Parler... https://twitter.com/donk_enby/status/1347939939120533506 https://twitter.com/donk_enby/status/1347939939120533506 https://twitter.com/donk_enby/status/1346565749977051136 https://twitter.com/donk_enby/status/1346565749977051136 It's literally, a far right wing propaganda machine and any other interpretation of this is misinformed.
    - trident5000 6y ago
      Sounds like hyperbole to me. Again we can flip this to "twitter is a left wing extremist platform" quite easily by finding the right tweet snapshots and pointing to prior events. And nobody knows the exact algos or moderation mechanisms for any of the platforms, the screenshots you linked say essentially nothing even with whoever that person is narrating. Im not saying hes wrong, but I'm certainly not taking it at face value. On other platforms there are similar reward systems. Blue check-marks for instance, and shadow banning is obviously a thing.
amadeuspagel 6y ago
> Hosting and serving isn't free What a pathetic excuse. It's not like Amazon was hosting parler for free.
onlyrealcuzzo 6y ago
As far as posting online, people aren't allowed to post child porn - anywhere. You don't get to complain about your free speech, or about hosting companies not hosting your child porn. In this case, it looks like they also don't want to host your death threats. There was no line to begin with. Nothing was crossed. This isn't anything new.
randyrand 6y ago
Consider this - If the conservative farmers and distributers individually decided not serve the bay area anyone, they are well within their rights. Political ideology is not protected, regardless of how important you perceive basic accommodations like shelter, food, or communication are.
- gameman144 6y ago
  Now consider the scenario where all the large agriculture firms and distributors cut off the Bay Area. Sure, the Bay Area could start their own farms to meet that need, but I could hardly imagine the whole population living there saying "This is fine, they're well within their rights." This feels to me like a situation of "fine for anyone to do, problematic for everyone to do". With political ideology not a protected class in many states, anyone is free to refuse service to an outspoken Democratic voter, but if a whole town did that it would be unthinkable. The specious answer of "just make your own business" wouldn't be practical in that scenario (are you going to start your own grocery, gas station, etc?). To be clear, I'm not trying to make a defense of Parler; my understanding having never signed up is that it was an unmoderated cesspool.I am, however, trying to point out that the end result of individuals making totally reasonable and rational decisions within their rights can produce outcomes that most people would view as wrong.
  - travisoneill1 6y ago
    At the time the constitution was written "everyone" in any given industry was thousands of small businesses each of which was only subject to the public pressure of the people in the town in which they were based. So it was literally unthinkable that a whole industry could deny service to one person. I bet if the founders had envisioned an entity as powerful as Amazon, they would have written in constraints for private entities too.
  - munificent 6y ago
    > Now consider the scenario where all the large agriculture firms and distributors cut off the Bay Area. Now consider that this exact scenario is currently affecting 23.5 million people in the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert
listenallyall 6y ago
The First Amendment, obviously, doesn't address TV or the internet but your statement "any private company has the freedom to decide what not to host" is false, television stations must adhere to the "equal time doctrine" and allot broadcasting time (the equivalent of hosting) to political candidates regardless of party affiliation or agenda. We also had a "fairness doctrine", the reinstatement of which had the support of many of today's prominent Democratic leaders (Pelosi, Durbin, Kerry). Point is, the government has, multiple times, recognized the power of "big media" to suppress political speech, and acted to regulate that power.
staunch 6y ago
Every private company in the U.S. is compelled by law to offer goods and services regardless of race, religion, etc. Adding political affiliation to the list of protected classes probably makes sense. It seems odd that it's not on the list, doesn't it? The bans we're seeing here are very clearly political. Parler is not breaking laws. It seems obvious that if Parler was being used by BLM to organize violent riots they would not get banned. As usual, one person's terrorist is another's freedom fighter. Anyone simplifying this whole thing into good vs bad is behaving like a member of a tribal mob. One thing that is certain is that private companies should not be the ones deciding these major cultural issues. The Supreme Court should resolve these issues.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
travisoneill1 6y ago
But since this action appears coordinated across major platforms and likely in response to political pressure from the now in power Democratic party (Amazon is being paid for hosting, so no advertisers fleeing issue), I think there now may be a real first amendment issue.
aftbit 6y ago
>> free speech > First Amendment These things are different. First Amendment protections restrict the US government from censoring protected speech. Free speech is a broader concept that covers any restrictions upon speech, including restrictions that are legal in the US. It seems that the right to free speech must be balanced against the harms that speech can cause, but I am tired of this meme that just because they're a private company, AWS et al should be able to block whatever they like. These tech companies have more power and knowledge than many governments of the previous century. We should be cautious advocating for a totally hands-off policy on how they use that power.
- disantlor 6y ago
  are you not just highlighting the fact that there is a First Amendment right but not a broader "free speech" right, which is the very point people are trying to make.
imgabe 6y ago
Parler was paying Amazon for hosting. Amazon wasn't doing it for free and hoping for ad revenue.

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
  Parler were paying for AWS.
GrinningFool 6y ago
> censored by a few giant private companies that self-police what can and can't be said But you have to keep in mind the other side of that - the protections around freedom of speech were put in place at a time when it was inconceivable that a majority of people in the country had the ability to be seen and heard _by the majority of other people in the country_. In near real-time, anytime. And that they could do so in a way that meant often they did not have to accept any consequence for the wider-ranging effects of their words. Separately I also have to wonder if the knowledge acquired as a result of that would have affected their framing. In particular the advances in psychology and group psychology, and in understanding how it's possible to use this instant mass communication to manipulate even people who are on guard against manipulation.
epistasis 6y ago
If these companies are "shutting you down" for your speech, it's the same sort of speech that would have gotten you shut down in the public square. Have they shut down text messaging, phone calls, group messaging, all the encrypted messaging apps? Do the tech companies control postal mail, letters to the editor, and printing presses? Of course not. You are looking for others to give you a platform to reach a wide audience. There are many. But no platform requires people to publish you. You have lost being able to yell in a public square, temporarily, due to public safety, but you haven't lost the ability to transmit speech that would have been acceptable in the public square. So so so tired of these false equivalencies, and an unwillingness to engage with the type of speech that results in this. Normal, political speech is just fine. Incitement to violence, no. Hell, AWS still hosts the publication that posted Bezos' dick pics! These shutdowns are not some sort of political censorship, these shutdowns are the natural result of speech that societies have determined not to be free.
- StanislavPetrov 6y ago
  >If these companies are "shutting you down" for your speech, it's the same sort of speech that would have gotten you shut down in the public square. That's completely absurd. Tens of thousands of people are silenced by corporations every day for speech that is considered offensive by one metric or another, but is by no means illegal. An associate of mine was permanently banned for, "deadnaming" someone else. Certainly very offensive according certain standards but hardly something that you wouldn't be allowed to say in the public park. You can reasonably argue about the right of private corporations to choose to do business with who they want, but you cannot reasonably argue that people are only being silenced for explicitly illegal behavior that would also be illegal offline.
  - vkou 6y ago
    If I get banned from HN for violating it's ToS (By, say, personally attacking people, or posting links to pornography, or just engaging in insane off-topic ramblings), can I also describe that as being silenced for my beliefs? Despite retaining access to hundreds of unmoderated channels by which I can communicate?
8note 6y ago
You can send a letter in the mail, can't you?
- Closi 6y ago
  Oh great, that totally resolves the dystopian nightmare we might be heading for!
  - scsilver 6y ago
    I mean, the UK is still has vestigial Monarchal components as opposed to the US constitution which was built from the ground up with severe limits and federation of power. We'd likely see that distopia in england long before the US justice system can adjust itself to allow it.
crazydoggers 6y ago
The difference with the phone companies is you’re talking one on one communication. Not a publishing platform which is what these social media services really are. You can always use text, signal, etc if you want to communicate with your group. These are the same kinds of issues society dealt with, with the advent of radio and television, platforms that allowed small groups to reach out to very large groups of people with minimal effort. Most countries have something like the FCC that regulates those platforms. Not only is it not permitted to incite violence in tv, even gross displays of real violence are censored, and even offensive speech. (For instance swearing). Now we can have debates about the degree of that censorship, but the topics of free speech and first amendment rights have largely been settled. If companies don’t self censor stuff that clearly 99% of society doesn’t like, then you’re going to see someone like the FCC or other government agencies step in. So what would you rather. If someone like Parler or Gab wants to exists, they are free to at the moment, and they are also free to speak anything they want to whom ever they want. They just don’t get to force other people to support them in the process. Coming from a family who’s relatives escaped from places which had true censorship, lack of any first amendment rights, the entitlement, and disconnect from reality in these arguments bothers me. You do not have a protected right to a mass publication forum. That is not a first amendment right. You do have the right to establish such a platform if you wish to. But just like you had to buy you’re own printing press, you’ll have to buy your own internet infrastructure. And I and other groups of citizens (including companies made up of those citizens) also have a right not to listen to you and to throw your pamphlets in the trash. And as a society, we have a right to limit free speech when it is very clearly only about hate and violence. You don’t get to call my house and tell me you’ll kill me for instance. “ Under state criminal codes, which vary by state, it is an offense to knowingly utter or convey a threat to cause death or bodily harm to any person. It is also an offense to threaten to burn, destroy or damage property or threaten to kill, poison or injure an animal or bird that belongs to a person.”
- a_band 6y ago
  > You can always use text, signal, etc if you want to communicate with your group. Does Signal run on AWS? If I can shut you down at the cloud level then I'm not sure these options will be available in the future. Someone is going to coordinate a protest/riot on Signal, screenshots will leak, then what happens?
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
munificent 6y ago
> these private companies control communication. I think verbs are important. Another way to say this is that these companies enable or provide communication. Imagine that COVID-19 had hit in the 80s before we had all of this. It would have been miserable, isolating, tragic. But would it make sense to blame the tech companies we have now for not existing then? Would it have been someone's fault? > All my communication with everyone I know is done via private companies. Another way to frame that is just to be thankful that those companies are there to enable that communication. That, of course, doesn't mean they are free from moral consequences or anything. But we are only beholden to them because they are providing us so much value. > 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 It was also authored in a time where "broadcasting" meant literally printing copies of pamphlets and physically depositing them in every town square you wanted to reach. I don't know if we have any clue how the Founding Fathers of the US would have interpreted today's communication systems. I think we need principles that are designed for the structures we do have without necessarily assuming any at-the-time-excellent principle from the 1700s must be directly mapped to today's needs.
- Closi 6y ago
  “Control communication” is intentional - Content is scanned to understand intent, promoted/demoted based on an invisible algorithm, and your communication can be labelled or shut down if you have a dissenting opinion. In-between your conversation political adverts are inserted, specifically tailored to your demographic data and personality profile (and rather than encouraging you to vote for the party, they are actually designed to disenfranchise you and make you not vote for anyone). This isn’t a future dystopia - this all already happens on Facebook. And that’s why this involves a level of control over being a neutral communication channel. > Another way to frame that is just to be thankful that those companies are there to enable that communication. Yes be thankful to mega corp. mega corp good. Mega corp has our interests at its heart.

emtel 6y ago

Free speech and the First Amendment are not the same thing. Free speech is a moral principle/ideal that exists independently of the US Constitution. The First Amendment guarantees a certain form of free speech in the United States. Private-sector censorship / restriction of speech is not in violation of the First Amendment. However, it may still amount to a restriction on free speech.

munificent 6y ago
Fair, but in this case we're talking about a US company hosting another US company's data, so I think talking about free speech in the context of the First Amendment is reasonable.
- emtel 6y ago
  It's not unreasonable, but I think it's incomplete. We may be headed towards a world in which private companies exert a great deal of control over what an individual can say. Not only by controlling communication platforms, but also by withholding employment from people who say certain things. I don't want to join the argument about whether that's good or bad, but I think it's a huge mistake to simply say "It's consistent with the 1st amendment, therefore it's OK." If we're going to let private corporations use their market power to police individual speech, we need to have a real debate about what that means.
- inglor_cz 6y ago
  The distinction between private and public sphere is not completely clear. Let us say that a politician calls Mark Zuckerberg and asks him nicely to squish certain people, and MZ complies. Is that a First Amendment issue or not? Or, let us say that a politician calls Mark Zuckerberg and offers him some concrete support (in an anti-trust case or taxation matters) for squishing certain people, and MZ takes up the offer. Is that a First Amendment issue or not? The trouble with both scenarios is that they are certainly possible and hard to prove or disprove. That is one of the reasons why concentration of power in a few hands (even private ones) may translate into bad politics.

jorblumesea 6y ago

I don't think the people that end up on Parler have a strong grasp of constitutional law (no offense to anyone that does and uses app). The general people that end up on that app are hardcore trending extremist and you're not going to find intelligent debate on the role of private companies and the government. It's probably closer to propaganda than it is a true social media site.

trident5000 6y ago
There are plenty of extremists on Twitter and Facebook. Thats where the double standard is. People organized on twitter when they stormed the white house and the pres went into a bunker as an example. Facebook is accused of much worse in foreign countries currently. The reason Parler was banned is because all these corporations are very aware they are under the anti-trust microscope. This was a favor to the new party in power in hopes of getting something back.
- jorblumesea 6y ago
  While I absolutely agree with the idea that every social media has extremes, I completely disagree with the end conclusions. Other social media services do not actively shape the debate through intense political moderation. There's no "Post tsar" the validates the political health of things that people host. Meanwhile on Parler... https://twitter.com/donk_enby/status/1347939939120533506 https://twitter.com/donk_enby/status/1347939939120533506 https://twitter.com/donk_enby/status/1346565749977051136 https://twitter.com/donk_enby/status/1346565749977051136 It's literally, a far right wing propaganda machine and any other interpretation of this is misinformed.
  - trident5000 6y ago
    Sounds like hyperbole to me. Again we can flip this to "twitter is a left wing extremist platform" quite easily by finding the right tweet snapshots and pointing to prior events. And nobody knows the exact algos or moderation mechanisms for any of the platforms, the screenshots you linked say essentially nothing even with whoever that person is narrating. Im not saying hes wrong, but I'm certainly not taking it at face value. On other platforms there are similar reward systems. Blue check-marks for instance, and shadow banning is obviously a thing.

amadeuspagel 6y ago

> Hosting and serving isn't free What a pathetic excuse. It's not like Amazon was hosting parler for free.

onlyrealcuzzo 6y ago

As far as posting online, people aren't allowed to post child porn - anywhere. You don't get to complain about your free speech, or about hosting companies not hosting your child porn. In this case, it looks like they also don't want to host your death threats. There was no line to begin with. Nothing was crossed. This isn't anything new.

randyrand 6y ago

Consider this - If the conservative farmers and distributers individually decided not serve the bay area anyone, they are well within their rights. Political ideology is not protected, regardless of how important you perceive basic accommodations like shelter, food, or communication are.

gameman144 6y ago
Now consider the scenario where all the large agriculture firms and distributors cut off the Bay Area. Sure, the Bay Area could start their own farms to meet that need, but I could hardly imagine the whole population living there saying "This is fine, they're well within their rights." This feels to me like a situation of "fine for anyone to do, problematic for everyone to do". With political ideology not a protected class in many states, anyone is free to refuse service to an outspoken Democratic voter, but if a whole town did that it would be unthinkable. The specious answer of "just make your own business" wouldn't be practical in that scenario (are you going to start your own grocery, gas station, etc?). To be clear, I'm not trying to make a defense of Parler; my understanding having never signed up is that it was an unmoderated cesspool.I am, however, trying to point out that the end result of individuals making totally reasonable and rational decisions within their rights can produce outcomes that most people would view as wrong.
- travisoneill1 6y ago
  At the time the constitution was written "everyone" in any given industry was thousands of small businesses each of which was only subject to the public pressure of the people in the town in which they were based. So it was literally unthinkable that a whole industry could deny service to one person. I bet if the founders had envisioned an entity as powerful as Amazon, they would have written in constraints for private entities too.
- munificent 6y ago
  > Now consider the scenario where all the large agriculture firms and distributors cut off the Bay Area. Now consider that this exact scenario is currently affecting 23.5 million people in the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert

listenallyall 6y ago

The First Amendment, obviously, doesn't address TV or the internet but your statement "any private company has the freedom to decide what not to host" is false, television stations must adhere to the "equal time doctrine" and allot broadcasting time (the equivalent of hosting) to political candidates regardless of party affiliation or agenda. We also had a "fairness doctrine", the reinstatement of which had the support of many of today's prominent Democratic leaders (Pelosi, Durbin, Kerry). Point is, the government has, multiple times, recognized the power of "big media" to suppress political speech, and acted to regulate that power.

staunch 6y ago

Every private company in the U.S. is compelled by law to offer goods and services regardless of race, religion, etc. Adding political affiliation to the list of protected classes probably makes sense. It seems odd that it's not on the list, doesn't it? The bans we're seeing here are very clearly political. Parler is not breaking laws. It seems obvious that if Parler was being used by BLM to organize violent riots they would not get banned. As usual, one person's terrorist is another's freedom fighter. Anyone simplifying this whole thing into good vs bad is behaving like a member of a tribal mob. One thing that is certain is that private companies should not be the ones deciding these major cultural issues. The Supreme Court should resolve these issues.

deleted 6y ago
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travisoneill1 6y ago

But since this action appears coordinated across major platforms and likely in response to political pressure from the now in power Democratic party (Amazon is being paid for hosting, so no advertisers fleeing issue), I think there now may be a real first amendment issue.

aftbit 6y ago

>> free speech > First Amendment These things are different. First Amendment protections restrict the US government from censoring protected speech. Free speech is a broader concept that covers any restrictions upon speech, including restrictions that are legal in the US. It seems that the right to free speech must be balanced against the harms that speech can cause, but I am tired of this meme that just because they're a private company, AWS et al should be able to block whatever they like. These tech companies have more power and knowledge than many governments of the previous century. We should be cautious advocating for a totally hands-off policy on how they use that power.

disantlor 6y ago
are you not just highlighting the fact that there is a First Amendment right but not a broader "free speech" right, which is the very point people are trying to make.

imgabe 6y ago

Parler was paying Amazon for hosting. Amazon wasn't doing it for free and hoping for ad revenue.