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I'm struggling to try to understand what this means for the risks of running a business in the cloud going forward. It was not just AWS dropping them, but many

by zmb_ 6y ago

I'm struggling to try to understand what this means for the risks of running a business in the cloud going forward. It was not just AWS dropping them, but many of their other vendors dropped them too, essentially killing their business overnight. Granted, for this first case the bar was extremely high. You needed literal storming of the Capitol and a platform seemingly specifically targeted at those people for this to happen. However, now that the precedent is set, I would expect the bar to be lowered going forward. That creates risks that need to somehow be mitigated (and reflected in valuations). Even for businesses that are not in such politically charged areas, I can easily imagine getting inadvertently tangled up in some popular issue and having vendors become targets of online activist (whether it's your own vendors, or whether you are a vendor to a target). What are the best mitigations here, both technical and social? Vocally side with the popular issues, or try to stay completely out of them, to try to avoid becoming a target (e.g., social media presence)? Try to reduce dependence on cloud providers and vendors by building more in-house? How far would you have to go, since a colo or an ISP can drop you just as AWS can?

himujjal 6y ago
exactly. look at whatsapp now for example. from being one of the most privacy friendly faces of the mobile to being portrayed as privacy invader (i know messages are E2EE). but see the effects. things happen slowly. did amazon or big tech do the right thing here? probably yes. did they see that their influence is massive? yes. (they already do know, just stirring up their convictions stronger now) Is there a chance in future that they might just misuse their powers without anyone knowing it? most certainly yes. Its a real trolley problem for me as a privacy supporter.
- sn_master 6y ago
  Messages are E2EE, but by default get backed up into your Google/Apple account which are easily accessible by a search warrant, or from a prism backdoor.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
sn_master 6y ago
Even their own lawyers dropped them out of fear....
Closi 6y ago
100% agree - but I think this can only be solved via legislation. Amazon has too much market power if it can shut down another company at the push of a button for something that isn't illegal (even if it's distasteful).
- caleb-allen 6y ago
  Amazon is not the only cloud provider. Parler could have just as easily been a customer of Microsoft or Google
  - nix23 6y ago
    Hehe as is if those are any better.
- Johnny555 6y ago
  Was the parler content legal? "Amazon Web Services suspended Parler from its web hosting services... citing a letter it had obtained that mentions 98 examples of Parler posts that "encourage and incite violence." Don't forget that Amazon also has legal liability for hosting and distributing illegal content. Amazon is not a monopoly -- the mitigation for AWS being able to cut off your business is to architect your application such that you can move it to another cloud vendor. If your content is so toxic that other cloud vendors won't accept you either, then maybe the problem isn't with the cloud vendors.
  - sn_master 6y ago
    "legal" in a democracy is something that only a court can decide. I don't know what was Parler's size, but in any website with millions of visitors a handful will post aweful things each day. Were those 98 posts posted by the same user? Did anyone report them and Parler refused to take them down? Were they popular or downvoted with few views?
    - nix23 6y ago
      I don't know who downvotes you, but it has to be a really blind, one sided person(-s)
cactus2093 6y ago
> What are the best mitigations here, both technical and social? Vocally side with the popular issues, or try to stay completely out of them, to try to avoid becoming a target (e.g., social media presence)? For now, don't attempt to overturn a fair democratic election and install an illegitimate government. Seems like a pretty easy thing to stay clear of. I get the concern you're expressing, but not everything is a slippery slope. This went so far beyond a "popular social issue of the day", as you admitted in your comment. IMO it's worth saving this outrage & concern for if and when something that is more genuinely a popular social issue causes AWS to take down sites. There were surely lots candidates for that earlier this year with a lot of the other protests that went on, were there any instances of sites taken down then? (I'm genuinely asking btw, I didn't hear of any but if there were then I think that is a much more appropriate place to start this conversation from. Certainly people have been fired from their jobs due to cancel culture but I don't know of anyone being shut off of all tech platforms).
- creatorbytes 6y ago
  That’s quite the straw man. We should separate an issue of moderation and actual motives of the platform itself. Did the platform have algorithms to make pro-capital storming posts ascend higher than other equally engaged posts? Did the owner/company make a call to violence? Did their platform spike in popularity in such a short time frame, they were unable to moderate to the same degree as other platforms? (Even Google struggles with YT moderation, though I understand the volume of content is widely different) It’s obvious there exist political ties to this. Sure, have Parler respond to a congressional hearing just as other tech companies have had to do. But removing them from all these services overnight, albeit technically legal (so far), reeks of anti trust. No matter political affiliation, the antitrust precedent set, if unpunished, will pave the way for greater censorship. This seems like a similar level to price fixing - multiple companies, competing even, coordinating to cancel competition. This is a new issue we have in the digital age. It should be handled in the Supreme Court.
  - zachrose 6y ago
    > We should separate an issue of moderation and actual motives of the platform itself Why though? On some level in seems impossible to make a distinction "from the outside," and I'm not sure it should matter that a decision was made by a person (probably following an Excel spreadsheet) or software.
DangerousPie 6y ago
I think the mitigation is "don't build a platform to attract white supremacists banned from other sites and then watch as they use it to plan a riot in the Capitol."
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- hertzrat 6y ago
  Imagine a hypothetical, well-intentioned free speech focused platform, without censorship and with low moderation: it will attract those people because those people have nowhere else to go. That strategy is a non-starter. The real requirement is that we are pushing for a world of auto-moderation where robots have to approve every single thing we say online - otherwise you are not allowed to let people communicate.
  - Daishiman 6y ago
    You platform is indeed hypothetical because what you're asking for is essentially impossible. Low moderation just doesn't work at large scale without a substantial number of people suffering from its effects, including harrassment, threats of violence, spamming, and child pornography. I would say that this hasn't been possible for at least the last 15 years.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - sbarre 6y ago
    Just to be clear about this specific case: There is "evidence" (Twitter posts) coming out that showed that all new users of Parler were shadowbanned by default, until their posts/content were approved by a small group of "right-think" moderators. So while your hypothetical isn't invalid in general, it's really not what was happening here with Parler. What they said they were trying to be was not at all what they were actually doing - a common theme in extremist spaces. But your overall concern about the concentration and centralization of our communications is legit. There's no easy answer there.
gnicholas 6y ago
It appears there is a business opportunity to (re)create infrastructure for use by companies/individuals that have been banned from the mainstream platforms. I'm sure such a platform would be despised by many in the mainstream, and most mainstream companies would not consider using them because customers would boycott them if they did. But for companies whose customers are primarily on the right, the cost/benefit could be favorable. If there are enough such companies, someone could build a business that caters to them. I don't know anything about how complex it would be to set up companies to replace AWS, Stripe, etc., but I imagine that at least some of these services will be offered (probably at higher cost, due to lower scale/efficiencies) within the next year or two. Even my liberal friends think that the de-platforming has gone too far — and the Trump presidency hasn't even officially ended yet. Most thought that the companies would wait until after Trump was no longer President and then ban him on the grounds that his behavior was only previously allowed because he was a political figure.
- gnicholas 6y ago
  I’m wondering — this has been downvoted, but the replies all seem to agree that the comment is true/reasonable. Am I misunderstanding the comments, or are there other thoughts on why this is an objectionable observation?
- SiliconMage 6y ago
  The end result will probably be two separate frameworks distanced from each other where each side is free to babble away in their echo chambers as much as they want.
  - gnicholas 6y ago
    We are certainly moving in that direction, unfortunately.
- jlkuester7 6y ago
  The two big issues that come to mind with this are DNS and SSL certs. AFIK both are really hard spaces to become a "provider", so you end up being reliant on the existing providers to do business with you. Sure there are decentralized solutions to these problems, but none of them really let you operate in the "normal" internet space...
namedpipe 6y ago
The best mitigation strategy here is to engage your vendors with private contracts instead of depending on generic terms of service (ToS) alone. Every company I've worked with has negotiated separate agreements with providers to reduce risk. Including contracts with both AWS and Azure. If your business gets to a certain size and you are still on the generic ToS and paying by credit card you have a big risk on your hands. You could be terminated at any point. With a private contract you can negotiate things like a termination notice. You can put in place a grace period before things are shut off. You can implement dispute procedures that are unique to your business needs so that when you and the vendor disagree it doesn't immediately disrupt your business. None of this is easy. But if your business absolutely depends on public cloud hosting you'd be stupid not to call up your vendor and negotiate. If you are unwilling to do that, then you need to make sure you diversify your cloud. It's much less likely that two competing cloud vendors would shut you off at exactly the same time.
- runako 6y ago
  I agree with this general idea, but also any bespoke service contract approved by a competent attorney will still have clauses for instant-kill under certain circumstances. For example, no provider would provide service under a bespoke contract obligating them to knowingly host & serve illegal content (because this creates legal liability for the provider). What is alleged about Parler would likely fit into the instant-kill provisions of even any reasonable bespoke contract. [Edit: obviously this does not apply to providers specifically in the business of catering to high-risk customers. Stripe doesn't do gambling or porn, but other providers presumably have different pricing or risk mitigation/tolerance and therefore on can use credit cards to pay for these items.]
  - bawolff 6y ago
    I think the poster was worried about slippery slope - today they come for the evil men, tomorrow they come for the unpopular men, the next day they come for me. In such a context i assume the poster isnt actually planning to host anything illegal or even distatsteful to current views, so a good contract should be fully negotiatable.
- 6y ago
Lutger 6y ago
Mitigation: don't try to overthrow a democratic government. If you want to build meinspace, be prepared to secure a server in Switzerland or something. I mean, video inciting violence in the name of the Jihad are also taken offline. This is pretty similar. The rules are fairly clear and rational and always have been, the only difference is that they are now enforced and there has been a coup attempt by white supremacists.
Nuzzerino 6y ago
> You needed literal storming of the Capitol and a platform seemingly specifically targeted at those people for this to happen. I fail to see how Parler should be expected to be responsible for the behavior of some users that share a demographic and political alignment with a group that stormed the Capitol. Was the planning for it done via Parler? Was it not Twitter where the announcement by Trump actually happened? The bar is already low my friend. This is nothing but an excuse for big tech to wield its trust effect to shut down potential competitors. If big tech believes that social media companies should be held accountable for its users' actions, then they should support the repeal of section 230, which would effectively have the same effect, except with the additional protections under the justice system. Why is it suddenly okay when big tech does the same without due process? Rules for thee, not for me.
drieddust 6y ago
These companies are sucking up to their new democratic overloads so make sure you do not anger them. Taliban have a twitter account, Ex PM of Malasia have openly justified Paris beheading, Iran's supremo calls for Jew genocide, and last but not the least China calls their Uighur detention camps as "reeducation" with zero consequences. So yes plan if you want but cost of executing the plan might be high enough to put you out of business.
- mcguire 6y ago
  "Taliban have a twitter account" President Trump came to an agreement with the Taliban, so somebody seems to think they're legitimate. (https://www.reuters.com/article/afghanistan-taliban-usa-int/trump-says-u-s-dealing-well-with-tough-smart-taliban-idUSKBN26934Q https://www.reuters.com/article/afghanistan-taliban-usa-int/...) "Ex PM of Malasia have openly justified Paris beheading" Which comment Twitter removed. (https://www.smh.com.au/world/europe/a-bigot-without-principles-ex-malaysian-pm-condemned-by-former-ambassador-to-france-20201030-p569xn.html https://www.smh.com.au/world/europe/a-bigot-without-principl...)
  - drieddust 6y ago
    1. Since when Twitter started complying to Trump? 2. Tweet stayed up until French government got involved. Mahatir is still free to post do it again. What about China and Iran? Last I checked Trump don't like them so why are they up?
bird_monster 6y ago
> I'm struggling to try to understand what this means for the risks of running a business in the cloud going forward. It was not just AWS dropping them, but many of their other vendors dropped them too, essentially killing their business overnight. Businesses that are not terror cells have nothing to worry about. Companies have always pulled away from extremist groups. You wouldn't expect Microsoft to accept a contract with ISIS, would you? This is really not that complicated. Once you attempt to overthrow a country's government, businesses in that country don't want to work with you. This has always been true.
- Nuzzerino 6y ago
  > Businesses that are not terror cells have nothing to worry about. What is your definition of a terror cell? Do Amazon, Microsoft, and Google qualify as terror cells for competing for billion dollar contracts with the DoD? This is an absurd benchmark with no basis in reality. https://cnbc.com/2019/10/25/microsoft-wins-major-defense-cloud-contract-beating-out-amazon.html https://cnbc.com/2019/10/25/microsoft-wins-major-defense-clo...
  - bird_monster 6y ago
    It's really not, and has never been. A group of people literally organized on Facebook and brought guns to overtake the capitol. It's pretty cut and dry. Again, nobody would've expected Microsoft to support ISIS' tech. Businesses have always pulled away from extremist groups like this, as is their right to do. The "whataboutism" on DoD contracts isn't relevant. If your stance is "Our own government is a terror cell", well obviously then our entire society is gone anyway, so why even bother discussing the ethics of tech in america at all? But obviously this stance is just hyperbole in an attempt to dismiss the validity of claiming the rioters as legitimate terrorists. And even by your own example, when has the DoD ever stormed the capitol? Or attempted to overthrow the US government? Spoiler: they haven't. And these insanely silly attempts at implying that legitimate businesses are under the same category as fascist extremists is a joke. This tech precedent pearl clutching is such an insanely bad look it's difficult to even fathom. My assertion is simple: when you try to overthrow a country's government, companies in that country don't want to work with you. The waters are muddier with respect to overthrowing other people's governments, but the DoD has never once attempted to overthrow the US government. There has never been an AWS-supported US coup (before last week). SO the "whatabouts" aren't even relevant.
GCA10 6y ago
I'd expect the bar to remain in exactly the same place. AWS has continued to host the National Enquirer, even after that publication dug deep into Jeff Bezos's personal life. Said coverage perhaps accelerated Bezos's divorce, which cost him $30 billion in stock, as part of the settlement with his ex-wife. ($30b is 2019 valuation; it's much bigger now.) If Amazon/AWS will quietly endure a $30b+ hit to its founder's wealth, without pulling the plug, I'd say the cloud-business risk you've identified should be one of the smallest stressors in your life.
- deno 6y ago
  Just strategically this doesn’t make any sense as banning National Enquirer would draw 100 times more attention to the story. If Bezos wants revenge he’s surely smart enough to get it quietly. Banning Parler also draws similar attention to it (I’ve never heard of it before today, for one), but it’s a calculated and coordinated (with Google, Apple) move to 1) take them down and 2) send a message to anyone watching. The point is the additional attention here is not unwanted and even desired. Not to mention such a retaliation would have come at a time when Trump (highly critical of Bezos) was still very much in power and had enough support in congress to use it against him.
mcguire 6y ago
Here are the AWS Service Terms (https://aws.amazon.com/service-terms/ https://aws.amazon.com/service-terms/) and the AWS Acceptable Use Policy (https://aws.amazon.com/aup/ https://aws.amazon.com/aup/). You are responsible for understanding and following these as well as the appropriate laws (which probably require the assistance of a lawyer, which I am not, and which is probably a good idea in any case). If a service provider refuses you service and you believe it violates the terms of service that you agreed to (that's going to be a hard row to hoe), you should have legal recourse. (Still not a lawyer, though.) Technically, the safest approach would be to build your own geographically-distributed server facilities and get your own Autonomous System Number. Remember to take care---the legal responsibilities in individual countries differ.
- nautilus12 6y ago
  The problem is that someone (Parler in this case) would have to actively build automated moderation systems or be philosophically aligned with moderation in order to fulfill the TOS in this case since its the users driving the violation. The baseline shouldn't require them build something, that seems like a burden too far. Suppose the violators were bots, doesn't this mean that anyone that can't build a moderation system to keep up with the bots becomes collateral damage?
  - res0nat0r 6y ago
    > doesn't this mean that anyone that can't build a moderation system to keep up with the bots becomes collateral damage? Yes.
crististm 6y ago
Taken from The Book: "don't lend money to someone more powerful than you!". I would say this is a business failure. They should have prepared for that and they did not.
analog31 6y ago
Every week there's a front page story on HN to the tune of "X froze my account and won't tell me why, and their appeal process is totally opaque." I think that to some extent, the availability of multiple providers, and the risk of getting kicked out, are the long term remedy. People will figure out how to mitigate sole-source risks. There might be a risk-reward tradeoff, i.e., the most desirable platforms from a short term profit standpoint might carry the biggest risk of getting shutdown. There will always be somebody who will let you in, at some level of service and security.
shadowgovt 6y ago
Probably to mitigate the way one mitigates against other disasters, such as natural disasters or political upheaval in a nation: have an exit plan to a partitioned cloud environment. Since we're talking political consequences, the partitioning here would be political. Whatever nation owns the companies you do business with, find counterpart companies in nations on poor terms with those host nations and have a plan in place to ramp up infrastructure in those nations quickly (or keep it on "hot standby"). There is the risk that data migration could violate laws in the originating nation, if you're exfiltrating data that the host nation's laws don't allow to be exfiltrated.
ogre_codes 6y ago
> What are the best mitigations here What are you trying to mitigate? You can't mitigate "Getting banned for making a place to plan a coup". You can't mitigate "I want a place to allow posts advocating criminal activity". If people were openly discussing breaking and entering houses, should that be allowed too? Why should we tolerate publicly planning violence when we don't tolerate publicly planning other crimes?
- bawolff 6y ago
  You can mitigate anything (i dont think you should, but that is a different question). I dont think the original poster was suggesting that type of thing (more a fear of slippery slope), but for the sake of argument, if they were tor hidden services would be the obvious way to mitigate.
  - ogre_codes 6y ago
    > You can mitigate anything My point is what this guy seems to want to enable is fundamentally conspiring to commit crimes. He seems to talk around that, but that's where we are.
    - bawolff 6y ago
      I think you're reading in things he did not say. He seems concerned he will be unpopular not illegal. Whether or not that is a reasonable concern is debatable... but history certainly has examples of that sort of thing. That said, there are plenty of websites that do conspire to do illegal acts and seem to get away with it, for a time at least. (pirate bay, sci-hub are two im ok with ethically. The silk road is an example im less ok with)
      - ogre_codes 6y ago
        Parler had no trouble getting in the App Store and AWS when they were perceived as merely espousing an unpopular opinion. Parler was blocked only after there was clear evidence that criminal activity was being openly planned on their platform and that planning was acted on.
JKCalhoun 6y ago
At the risk of sounding snide, it appears that if your business plan is to attract the type of users that foment hate and violence ... you are in a risky business. Anything other than that at this point is a slippery slope fallacy.
nodamage 6y ago
I am not sure why people are treating this like it's new? There is already a massive list of things you can't do on AWS, for example running a spam operation, pirated software trading site, drug trading site, etc. Is it really so surprising that this list also includes running a site where violent attacks are planned?
- ehsankia 6y ago
  It's not too different from how you should diversify your income as a Youtuber, especially if you make content about controversial topics. They knew that their platform was going to host controversial content, I'm honestly surprised how little redundancy they had planned for here.
bob1029 6y ago
Best mitigation is to involve as few 3rd parties as possible. Find more obscure allies in the space who are not motivated (controlled) by public perception and political gains. Consider building your own tools and technologies to replace 3rd parties. For instance, the load balancing and DDOS protection products sold by Cloudflare are not the effects of some ancient mystical artifact that we could never hope to emulate. These are simple network engineering practices that can be replicated by any experienced IT staff. Sure, you might not be able to mitigate a theoretical 100+ terabit DDOS attack, but is this actually a problem in practice for your business? Even if you have ridiculous capacity, at a certain point you would still have to defer to ISPs, law enforcement and other external measures in order to restore sane operations. Certainly, there is no perfect solution. But, the more of your stack you have under your exclusive physical control the better.
- lolc 6y ago
  I have no reason to believe that Parler has the means to build infrastructure for DDOS mitigation that compares in any way to Cloudflare. If you're not a multihomed AS, you can't even begin to offer what Cloudflare offers. > But, the more of your stack you have under your exclusive physical control the better. Where's the cutoff? Lay your own fiber to your own datacenters? At some point economy dictates that you rent. And with Parler, I'd assume that that point comes sooner than later. I mean I don't know their funding situation, but I find it reasonable to assume that if they'd built a NOC first they wouldn't have gotten off the ground at all.
  - bob1029 6y ago
    Sometimes the trick isn't so much about the technology, but about the regulatory environment and your agility within it. The Pirate Bay is still online, so getting around this kind of thing isn't entirely unprecedented. Something to consider on the tech front would be Starlink. What happens when the orbital layer is independent of terrestrial backhaul under ideal routing conditions? Consider the implications of a datacenter that is in space or located at a geographic location that is incredibly difficult to access. Just a decent desktop PC hooked up to a 100mbps pipe can serve a lot of traffic if the application is built properly (i.e. text-only).
kenjackson 6y ago
Why would the bar be lower in the future? This action is really not something any company wants to do. I expect the bar to remain nearly the same.
bawolff 6y ago
The best mitigation is negotiating strong contracts with significant penalties if the provider does not provide the services promised. Its not like getting screwed over because a vendor changes its mine about fulfilling its obligations half way through is a new issue, this is just a bit of an exceptional case of that.
- quickthrowman 6y ago
  No provider is going to sign a contract that forces them to host illegal content that opens them up to liability.
  - bawolff 6y ago
    Poster never said he intended to host illegal content.
- teddyh 6y ago
  “Your faith in the legal system is appalling.” https://www.schlockmercenary.com/2009-06-26 https://www.schlockmercenary.com/2009-06-26
  - bawolff 6y ago
    Penalties for non performance is like the most standard thing possible in a contract. Its hardly some unfair clause like you agree not to sue ever. Hell, even without a clause specificly stating penalties, you could still probably sue for damages from breaching a contract. (Obviously in the parler case amazon probably didnt breach, but if you are negotiating your own contract it probably wouldn't allow for arbitrary termination with no notice)
jimbob45 6y ago
You’re preaching to the choir. We’ve been having discussions on HN for years about the dangers of swapping the short-term benefits of AWS for the long-term dangers it can bring. I’m sure there’s some Nostradamus on here that predicted this exact situation with Parler. The dangers were obvious and clear to anyone who was paying attention but not everyone was paying attention. Hopefully, this gets managers and CEOs to double-check if the benefits of AWS/EWS truly outweigh the risks.
jacquesm 6y ago
Read the TOS before subscribing to a service would be a good start. And have a plan 'B' and if you plan on starting a revolution maybe have a plan 'C', 'D' and 'E' as well just in case.
imperio59 6y ago
Bullying is real. My wife and I run a side Business Saas product. She is listed as COO on her social media profile for the company. She is also in a bunch of groups about gardening in our local area. During the height of BLM protests and CHOP/CHAZ, someone made a post that was very off-topic for the group, basically saying we should all support what was happening in the CHOP and all the violence against cops was justified due to racial injustice. My wife took no position on the issue but politely replied saying the post felt off-topic and she didn't want to hear about politics in her favorite gardening group. Several people attacked her on the post, calling her white privileged, racist, etc... all for suggesting the post was off-topic (even though the group's own rules prohibited political content). One person took it a step further and went on her profile to see where she worked. They then messaged our company's social media profile to tell our company that my wife was a racist, and she should be fired or reprimanded because she had made racist comments in a FB group (she had not, and the person provided no screenshots/proof either). Unfortunately for that person, they did not realize they were talking to my wife's husband (me) who promptly banned them from our page and blocked their profile from my/my wife's profiles so they could no longer bother us. However, this type of new "online activism" is rampant nowadays. Small companies often have little choice but to comply or be publicly shamed/bullied, including doxxing or going after individual employees, as in our story. I disapprove of this type of behavior. This is mob justice in a different form. It is the court of public opinion rather than an actual court of law where someone would get a chance to defend themselves. It is wrong and our society needs to grow up past this childish phase it's going through where every angry person riled up by this or that party's rhetoric feels like they have the right to attempt to destroy another person's livelihood for the sake of pushing "their truth" or "justice". That's not what Justice is.
- jhowell 6y ago
  > My wife took no position on the issue but politely replied saying the post felt off-topic and she didn't want to hear about politics in her favorite gardening group. > Several people attacked her on the post, calling her white privileged, racist, etc... all for suggesting the post was off-topic (even though the group's own rules prohibited political content). Isn't the ability to decide what issue your bring to a space and then deciding which issues you'll "take no position" a privilege?
m1sta_ 6y ago
I'm not sure there is a real risk. Slippery slope falacy is easy to reach for here.
nhoughto 6y ago
Kinda interesting as a threat model, if 4chan/the wrong people can maliciously use your service enough to get it cancelled / shutdown just for the lols. I imagine a few startups aren’t building moderating content / moderation teams as part of their MVP..
jounker 6y ago
Don’t run a social network designed to host right wing extremists, and you should be fine.
- lightgreen 6y ago
  Parler was not "designed to host right wing extremists", same way 1st amendment was not designed to provide free speech to "right wing extremists". It was designed to provide free speech to everyone. And hypothetical right wing extremists occasionally use it same way they use telephones and supermarkets.
  - redleader55 6y ago
    This looks a lot like the gun discussion. Some people believe X is just a tool, other people say because X is used for doing bad things, it should be banned. Technically this is exactly the line separating left from right, I don't think there will be a conclusion or agreement on this.
    - lightgreen 6y ago
      > conclusion or agreement on this Agreement may be in discussing hard facts and not assigning emotional labels.
lanevorockz 6y ago
BLM caused the deaths of over 80 people and nobody deplatformed Facebook or Twitter. This is obviously about the belief that republicans are not human.
- chess_buster 6y ago
  Sure buddy.
- TomBombadildoze 6y ago
  citation needed
- hintymad 6y ago
  A nuance: AWS de-platformed Parler for its insufficient moderation on violence-inciting discussion, not for existence of such discussion. Not that I agree with or disagree with AWS decision, but it's worth having a nuanced discussion. A larger problem I see in the US is that many, if not all, nuanced discussions are considered evil by the left or by the right.
- gairhgfqiu 6y ago
  Have you seen Parlor? It actually hosted and glorified violent videos. In comments, people were celebrating beating of cops. As for BLM, I don't know if they have any central location where they plan any violence and then share videos of that.
- heleninboodler 6y ago
  I think you're setting an egregiously false equivalence here. BLM didn't openly plan to kill 80 people on Facebook. And if the right-wingers had merely planned to have protests and some crimes happened to be committed at those protests, Parler wouldn't be shut down now.
obviouslynotme 6y ago
If AWS is dropping you, then Facebook, Twitter, and Google probably already have. Stripe, Cloudflare, and Paypal are probably doing the same. If you try to continue, Visa, MasterCard, and your ISP will shut you down next. This is the world we live in now. You can be removed from commerce by a unanimous decision that you will be told never happened. I am just glad I can shut people down hard now when they say, "If you don't like X, then build your own X." I have now watched two Twitter clones and one Patreon clone be shutdown by magical sudden decisions made in lockstep. My guess is that BitChute is next.
- jhowell 6y ago
  > I have now watched two Twitter clones and one Patreon clone be shutdown by magical sudden decisions made in lockstep. Magical?
  - drak0n1c 6y ago
    I believe the commenter is referring to the coordinated collusion of the activity, which is reminiscent of anti-competitive cartels.
    - jhowell 6y ago
      Seems a false equivalent to compare the events that caused these recent terminations to the past, or "magic." What about that should be protected?
- res0nat0r 6y ago
  Parler obviously only existed to cater to right wing extrimsm and violent rhetoric. It's the reason they "couldn't" moderate it, as if they did there would be no reason for it to exist. Reddit is still around even after r/thedonald and other violent / hateful subreddits were on the site and finally banned. The difference is reddit doesn't primarily exist to foster violence and extremism.
- ctvo 6y ago
  What unfortunate circumstances we find ourselves in when the cost of doing business with a company associated with white supremacists, insurrectionists, and murderers outweighs the benefits so much that other private businesses won't sell them things. Everyone is entitled to force themselves on Apple, Google, Amazon, Twilio, Stripe, et al., right? I find a depressing majority of the people screaming censorship at the top of their lungs believe people are not entitled to health care or free education in this country. That would be big government. People however are entitled to make you do business with them, even if it's financially damaging to you.
kmeisthax 6y ago
"Every cloud vendor in the world telling you off" is a particular threat model only usually encountered by literal terrorist groups, torrent sites, Sci-Hub... and now right-wing filter-bubbles. In this case, Parler will need to either build all their own infrastructure or sign up with some really skeevy second-world hosting sites. This, interestingly, means being hosted on the same servers that host actual terrorists like Hamas; if they intend to remain a legal corporate outfit their lawyers will probably have some very strong words about using such services. Building your own infrastructure is expensive, even without the particular threat of just being Parler. Notably, net neutrality has been dead in the water ever since Trump took office, so anything high-value becomes extraordinarily expensive fast. I doubt other sites are going to face this same problem in the future. Parler's problem is not that they're on the "wrong side" of a political debate; it's that they deliberately aided and abetted the planning of literal insurrection. Providing any sort of service to them is a huge legal risk to your enterprise now. If the bar for technical deplatforming was lowered beyond "technically legal", you'd see the market for alternative infrastructure providers open up, because those are customers that AWS/Google Cloud/Azure are no longer serving. AWS can only "get away with" deplatforming Parler specifically due to the legally risky nature of working with them.
icare_1er 6y ago
It is easy to see where that trend is going. Little steps by little steps, GAFAs while turn the West in an environment similar to Iran or China when it comes to freedom of speech.
okprod 6y ago
If you a run a business that violates the terms of service of your vendors, be prepared to be cut off. It's like if I rent an apartment and decide to make meth; I shouldn't be surprised if I get evicted.
grahamburger 6y ago
I am optimistic that we won't tumble down the slippery slope. We do need to be careful about it, though, and watch for threats to democracy from all angles. IMO it wouldn't be such a bad thing if this instance weakened the market dominance of SV and gave room in the market for new entrants. Hosting providers outside U.S. jurisdiction, for example, or decentralized social networks.
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mempko 6y ago
President has been set long ago. From child porn, pirating websites, to al-Qaeda websites. There is nothing new about Parler being kicked off hosting sites. It took me five minutes being on the site to see calls for violence.
cphoover 6y ago
> specifically targeted at those people for this to happen. was it though? Wasn't it just a twitter without censorship?
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vivekl 6y ago
This problem would have been even more pronounced if running from a co-lo/non-cloud entity. Imagine getting a court-ordered shutdown or confiscation of servers for evidence etc. Frankly you would expect a "high"-profile/controversial service like Parler to have at least conceived of the possibility of a take-down from a cloud service and had a plan in place for it. Amazon had already cut ties with Gab last year [1] so this should not have been a huge surprise. [1] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/far-right-haven-gabcom-had-its-fundraising-site-shut-down https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/far-right-haven...
bhntr3 6y ago
If you host user-generated content, you will have to decide on community standards and do your best to enforce them. This will be expensive. You are legally obligated to police things like terrorism, child pornography, money laundering and even DMCA violations. You are morally obligated to do more than just that, not just by your conscience, but also by the global zeitgeist. Of course some absurdity lies in making believe your corporation has a conscience. You may have a conscience. But ultimately, no matter what corporate culture you instill, your corporation is a psychopath. So your corporation will be Dexter and you do your best to operate it like it cares about people and issues and is a good citizen (since after all, it is legally a person.) If you do this poorly, it is revealed to have no soul and punished. If you do it well, you get a brand. If covering for a psychopath whose only motivation is money and whose opinions are the amalgamation of half-formed thoughts from hundreds or thousands of different individuals isn't your idea of a good time, then maybe running a business isn't the best idea.
f430 6y ago
Excellent points I agree that this sets a dangerous precedent. > What are the best mitigations here, both technical and social We are witnessing it now on HN. There's a huge uptick in deplatform-proof p2p mesh networks running web applications. How do you take down a mesh network that will simply regenerate and absorb most external shocks? I believe that the future of the internet would be fragmented into a conventional centralized server like we see with AWS dominating the market which will still serve useful purpose for most applications and another for the rest. With Moore's law and 6G we are heading towards a hyper connected world that will facilitate the rise of robust, secure, mesh network based software that runs on our phones. It will not be without trouble, people will find ways to poison the well. The mesh network would evolve into essentially islands where you physically travel to in order to join that private network to minimize DDOS, MITM attacks. It would be a cyberpunkesque reality where to buy a bag of weed in a non-legal state, you simply head towards a dark alley, connect to the mesh network, find the drop, and head back to your tiny apartment occasionally poking your head out the window to take in the sights of foggy neon-lit streets with flying cars and spiky haired gender-neutral entities shouting "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it no more!"
swiley 6y ago
If you build your entire business on a platform controlled by one entity and they decide they don't like you then you better hope none of the debt is secured because that's the end. It's surprising and disappointing how few people get this. It's like the idea that profit requires selling things for more than they cost.
cm2187 6y ago
I find the "overnight" more shocking than terminating a contract. That they would be so callous toward a customer should make anyone think twice before signing up.
- lindenksv85 6y ago
  I find it highly unlikely that they didn’t have conversations beforehand. It’s also really black and white - they were proud of their lack of moderation and said it publicly. It’s not like there was a misunderstanding. Plus an org like Parler has its own lawyers. There is no way they weren’t warned of their contractual obligations by their own counsel. They just chose to take that risk.
  - cm2187 6y ago
    I wasn't under the table but Parler's CEO claims there was no prior notice.
gairhgfqiu 6y ago
How does ISIS and other terrorist orgs host their propaganda? I see a pretty funny future where Trump supporters and ISIS work together to figure out where they can host their content.
Florin_Andrei 6y ago
> However, now that the precedent is set, I would expect the bar to be lowered going forward. That creates risks that need to somehow be mitigated (and reflected in valuations). Ah, yes, the "everything is a slippery slope" propaganda technique.
kingaillas 6y ago
>What are the best mitigations here, both technical and social? Don't violate the terms of service of other businesses you depend on? For all the hard-core libertarian/corporate/free market cheerleaders, isn't this the libertarian way to handle it? CorpA and CorpB have a service agreement/contract, CorpA feels like CorpB violated it, kicks them off, courts handle the aftermath?
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Zelphyr 6y ago
Not to put too fine a point on what you said but since lot of people here are saying, in essence, "Unless you do support storming the Capitol then you have nothing to worry about" I think it's worth highlighting with a concrete example that isn't outside the realm of possibility. Let's say you own a company with about 100 employees. You have never taken a political stand beyond voting. Now let's imagine that two of those employees say something on their personal social media that is insensitive to some. Someone somewhere is going to figure out where those two people work and show up at your digital doorstep. If you as the business owner don't respond in a way that people approve of then those same people are going to go to your vendors such as AWS, etc... and demand they drop you as a customer. If those vendors side with those people strongly enough, or are afraid of them enough, then you may get dropped as quickly as Parler was. Let's be clear on a key distinction here: you're the CEO of a company providing a SaaS product with no relation or affiliation to politics whatsoever, whereas Parler was clearly enabling and encouraging illegal and seditious activity and their being shut down is completely justified. That distinction isn't clear in the minds of a great many people. Especially in today's highly charged political environment.
- lindenksv85 6y ago
  Either the baker gets to decide whether to make a gay wedding cake or they don’t. Which one is it??
  - Zelphyr 6y ago
    That's quite a straw man comparison to the scenario I describe.
ineedasername 6y ago
I think it means that if you blatantly violate their ToS and don't fix it after multiple conversations then you won't be able to use their service.
markdown 6y ago
Parler was filled with posts urging the killing of jews, lefties, BLM supporters, democrats, university professors, and millennials. It should have been dropped a long time ago, as should any platform that allows that kind of talk.
cryptica 6y ago
These days you have to create 'financial incentives' just to get people to do the right thing... Every business is going to need crypto. You need to bribe people into doing the right thing to prevent them from being bribed into doing the wrong thing. It's going to be cheaper to bribe people into doing the right thing than to bribe them into doing the wrong thing... We just have to let good people know that bribing is OK so that bad people don't have a monopoly over it... As is the case today.
deeviant 6y ago
> However, now that the precedent is set, I would expect the bar to be lowered going forward. Why is that? In general, a slippery slope argument is a poor one. > Even for businesses that are not in such politically charged areas, I can easily imagine getting inadvertently tangled up in some popular issue and having vendors become targets of online activist I can imagine a lot of things, I'm sure you can too. But what matters is, is it likely? If, let's say, Slack got taken down by this because it was found that sound rioters used it to coordinate, I would imagine there would be an absolutely huge backlash even today with a situation as dire as the capitol riots. I can't answer your last question, and it is a good question. But I do agree with AWS and others: the answer is not to do nothing.
- h3cate 6y ago
  They used to say the same thing about wiretaps. Now the government can enter your name into xkeyscore and have access to your life
LockAndLol 6y ago
I would echo the words of that black dude in that show about drugs and cops in Baltimore: "Diversify yo bonds, nigga" aka "Don't put all your eggs in one basket". Apply them to your scenario if you can. Two cloud providers from different countries. Duplicate your data across both, which is good for backups anyway. Maybe try and use chaos computing to stimulate entire data centers going down on you. Parler would've done well to encrypt their data and use some kind of distributed data storage for their usecase. Probably should've gotten servers in Russia, China, Romania or something and maybe even hosted an eep- or onion-site. They were obviously on the fringe and hosting their stuff on mainstream services would've ended badly sooner or later. Know your usecase, know your risks, and prepare accordingly.
PopsiclePete 6y ago
I'm not sure anyone in the (near) future will be able to guarantee you some sort of "right" that you can host/publish whatever you want and not be held accountable. America is a country that prides itself (to an absolute ridiculous fault) on "freedom of speech" and "the free market will handle it". Well, the market handled it, didn't it. When the government fell short, the market stepped in. The last 20 years have polarized society to the breaking point. To think that we can continue down this path and be governable, as a people...it's just not happening. The "free ride" we've enjoyed so far is basically over. Sadly, too many Americans can't tell conspiracy theories and made-up fairy-tales from reality and so now we all lose. The coming administration already has an axe to grind with Big Tech and they will grind it. Both the Left and the Right want to see Big Tech reigned in in some way and even though the reasons might be different, the end result will be the same - host "uncomfortable" content and be censored.
x3iv130f 6y ago
It is a reminder to operate with sensitivity to the laws and customs of the land we do business in, even if we don't agree with it. The days of the internet as a wild west no man's land is over.
thegrimmest 6y ago
It seems like disagreement in any degree can be interpreted as an incitement to violence if you have supporters who are prone to violence. While I support the right of private companies to do as they please, I think that Net Neutrality has a role to play here. The packets I send and whom I send them to should be protected by law in the same way that the letters I send are. It is a crime to open someone else's mail without a warrant, even if that mail contains hate speech or incitement to violence. Private companies who carry mail are not excempt from this restriction, they are content-agnostic. I beleive ISPs fall firmly into this category, and that a strong case may be made for cloud hosting providers as well. With regards to accountability, individuals are accountable for their actions. It was those people who trespassed and committed violence who should be, and it seems will be, held accountable. Those who directly (as in "go here and do this") incited them, or directly planned their actions, committed crimes as well. Those who simply failed to condone them, or who expressed sympathy with their ideals and causes, or who delivered their mail, are not responsible for the actions of those people.
tonfreed 6y ago
This debate has been happening since Anglin and Cloudflare. There was a similar discussion when Lauren Southern was banned from Patreon, and Laura Loomer isn't even allowed to order an Uber anymore. This will become more common, all it will take will be an allegation even without proof and you'll be denied all services.
stubish 6y ago
> I'm struggling to try to understand what this means for the risks of running a business in the cloud going forward. This is nothing new, and the risks of running a business are the same. If your suppliers drop your business, you have to find a new supplier or you are dead. And you get to decide if you want to chase compensation in the courts (breach of contract, persecution based on protected classes such as politics or race) or not. The suppliers who are not allowed to drop you are regulated and called utilities. AWS dropping the ban hammer here is interesting, as the end result might end up with cloud services getting regulated and defined as a utility.
totalZero 6y ago
Parler isn't the first app to get cut from app/play store, and it's not the first online service to be given the cold shoulder by its infrastructure providers. If you rely on a provider, don't motivate the provider to end its relationship with you. The best mitigation here is, first, don't cater to fascists who want to tear apart the fabric of American society. Second, if you're going to piss people off, either set up a contract that doesn't give your infrastructure provider the freedom to end its relationship with you, or do without the benefits of cloud. AWS isn't a utility, and its services are largely replaceable -- buy some computers and set up your own servers.
ca98am79 6y ago
Technically the best mitigation is to use a decentralized service that cannot be censored. Socially the best mitigation is the same as always, be honest and peaceful.

by zmb_ 6y ago

himujjal 6y ago

exactly. look at whatsapp now for example. from being one of the most privacy friendly faces of the mobile to being portrayed as privacy invader (i know messages are E2EE). but see the effects. things happen slowly. did amazon or big tech do the right thing here? probably yes. did they see that their influence is massive? yes. (they already do know, just stirring up their convictions stronger now) Is there a chance in future that they might just misuse their powers without anyone knowing it? most certainly yes. Its a real trolley problem for me as a privacy supporter.

sn_master 6y ago
Messages are E2EE, but by default get backed up into your Google/Apple account which are easily accessible by a search warrant, or from a prism backdoor.

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sn_master 6y ago

Even their own lawyers dropped them out of fear....

Closi 6y ago

100% agree - but I think this can only be solved via legislation. Amazon has too much market power if it can shut down another company at the push of a button for something that isn't illegal (even if it's distasteful).

caleb-allen 6y ago
Amazon is not the only cloud provider. Parler could have just as easily been a customer of Microsoft or Google
- nix23 6y ago
  Hehe as is if those are any better.
Johnny555 6y ago
Was the parler content legal? "Amazon Web Services suspended Parler from its web hosting services... citing a letter it had obtained that mentions 98 examples of Parler posts that "encourage and incite violence." Don't forget that Amazon also has legal liability for hosting and distributing illegal content. Amazon is not a monopoly -- the mitigation for AWS being able to cut off your business is to architect your application such that you can move it to another cloud vendor. If your content is so toxic that other cloud vendors won't accept you either, then maybe the problem isn't with the cloud vendors.
- sn_master 6y ago
  "legal" in a democracy is something that only a court can decide. I don't know what was Parler's size, but in any website with millions of visitors a handful will post aweful things each day. Were those 98 posts posted by the same user? Did anyone report them and Parler refused to take them down? Were they popular or downvoted with few views?
  - nix23 6y ago
    I don't know who downvotes you, but it has to be a really blind, one sided person(-s)

cactus2093 6y ago

> What are the best mitigations here, both technical and social? Vocally side with the popular issues, or try to stay completely out of them, to try to avoid becoming a target (e.g., social media presence)? For now, don't attempt to overturn a fair democratic election and install an illegitimate government. Seems like a pretty easy thing to stay clear of. I get the concern you're expressing, but not everything is a slippery slope. This went so far beyond a "popular social issue of the day", as you admitted in your comment. IMO it's worth saving this outrage & concern for if and when something that is more genuinely a popular social issue causes AWS to take down sites. There were surely lots candidates for that earlier this year with a lot of the other protests that went on, were there any instances of sites taken down then? (I'm genuinely asking btw, I didn't hear of any but if there were then I think that is a much more appropriate place to start this conversation from. Certainly people have been fired from their jobs due to cancel culture but I don't know of anyone being shut off of all tech platforms).

creatorbytes 6y ago
That’s quite the straw man. We should separate an issue of moderation and actual motives of the platform itself. Did the platform have algorithms to make pro-capital storming posts ascend higher than other equally engaged posts? Did the owner/company make a call to violence? Did their platform spike in popularity in such a short time frame, they were unable to moderate to the same degree as other platforms? (Even Google struggles with YT moderation, though I understand the volume of content is widely different) It’s obvious there exist political ties to this. Sure, have Parler respond to a congressional hearing just as other tech companies have had to do. But removing them from all these services overnight, albeit technically legal (so far), reeks of anti trust. No matter political affiliation, the antitrust precedent set, if unpunished, will pave the way for greater censorship. This seems like a similar level to price fixing - multiple companies, competing even, coordinating to cancel competition. This is a new issue we have in the digital age. It should be handled in the Supreme Court.
- zachrose 6y ago
  > We should separate an issue of moderation and actual motives of the platform itself Why though? On some level in seems impossible to make a distinction "from the outside," and I'm not sure it should matter that a decision was made by a person (probably following an Excel spreadsheet) or software.

DangerousPie 6y ago

I think the mitigation is "don't build a platform to attract white supremacists banned from other sites and then watch as they use it to plan a riot in the Capitol."

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hertzrat 6y ago
Imagine a hypothetical, well-intentioned free speech focused platform, without censorship and with low moderation: it will attract those people because those people have nowhere else to go. That strategy is a non-starter. The real requirement is that we are pushing for a world of auto-moderation where robots have to approve every single thing we say online - otherwise you are not allowed to let people communicate.
- Daishiman 6y ago
  You platform is indeed hypothetical because what you're asking for is essentially impossible. Low moderation just doesn't work at large scale without a substantial number of people suffering from its effects, including harrassment, threats of violence, spamming, and child pornography. I would say that this hasn't been possible for at least the last 15 years.
- deleted 6y ago
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- sbarre 6y ago
  Just to be clear about this specific case: There is "evidence" (Twitter posts) coming out that showed that all new users of Parler were shadowbanned by default, until their posts/content were approved by a small group of "right-think" moderators. So while your hypothetical isn't invalid in general, it's really not what was happening here with Parler. What they said they were trying to be was not at all what they were actually doing - a common theme in extremist spaces. But your overall concern about the concentration and centralization of our communications is legit. There's no easy answer there.

gnicholas 6y ago

It appears there is a business opportunity to (re)create infrastructure for use by companies/individuals that have been banned from the mainstream platforms. I'm sure such a platform would be despised by many in the mainstream, and most mainstream companies would not consider using them because customers would boycott them if they did. But for companies whose customers are primarily on the right, the cost/benefit could be favorable. If there are enough such companies, someone could build a business that caters to them. I don't know anything about how complex it would be to set up companies to replace AWS, Stripe, etc., but I imagine that at least some of these services will be offered (probably at higher cost, due to lower scale/efficiencies) within the next year or two. Even my liberal friends think that the de-platforming has gone too far — and the Trump presidency hasn't even officially ended yet. Most thought that the companies would wait until after Trump was no longer President and then ban him on the grounds that his behavior was only previously allowed because he was a political figure.

gnicholas 6y ago
I’m wondering — this has been downvoted, but the replies all seem to agree that the comment is true/reasonable. Am I misunderstanding the comments, or are there other thoughts on why this is an objectionable observation?
SiliconMage 6y ago
The end result will probably be two separate frameworks distanced from each other where each side is free to babble away in their echo chambers as much as they want.
- gnicholas 6y ago
  We are certainly moving in that direction, unfortunately.
jlkuester7 6y ago
The two big issues that come to mind with this are DNS and SSL certs. AFIK both are really hard spaces to become a "provider", so you end up being reliant on the existing providers to do business with you. Sure there are decentralized solutions to these problems, but none of them really let you operate in the "normal" internet space...

namedpipe 6y ago

The best mitigation strategy here is to engage your vendors with private contracts instead of depending on generic terms of service (ToS) alone. Every company I've worked with has negotiated separate agreements with providers to reduce risk. Including contracts with both AWS and Azure. If your business gets to a certain size and you are still on the generic ToS and paying by credit card you have a big risk on your hands. You could be terminated at any point. With a private contract you can negotiate things like a termination notice. You can put in place a grace period before things are shut off. You can implement dispute procedures that are unique to your business needs so that when you and the vendor disagree it doesn't immediately disrupt your business. None of this is easy. But if your business absolutely depends on public cloud hosting you'd be stupid not to call up your vendor and negotiate. If you are unwilling to do that, then you need to make sure you diversify your cloud. It's much less likely that two competing cloud vendors would shut you off at exactly the same time.

runako 6y ago
I agree with this general idea, but also any bespoke service contract approved by a competent attorney will still have clauses for instant-kill under certain circumstances. For example, no provider would provide service under a bespoke contract obligating them to knowingly host & serve illegal content (because this creates legal liability for the provider). What is alleged about Parler would likely fit into the instant-kill provisions of even any reasonable bespoke contract. [Edit: obviously this does not apply to providers specifically in the business of catering to high-risk customers. Stripe doesn't do gambling or porn, but other providers presumably have different pricing or risk mitigation/tolerance and therefore on can use credit cards to pay for these items.]
- bawolff 6y ago
  I think the poster was worried about slippery slope - today they come for the evil men, tomorrow they come for the unpopular men, the next day they come for me. In such a context i assume the poster isnt actually planning to host anything illegal or even distatsteful to current views, so a good contract should be fully negotiatable.
6y ago

Lutger 6y ago

Mitigation: don't try to overthrow a democratic government. If you want to build meinspace, be prepared to secure a server in Switzerland or something. I mean, video inciting violence in the name of the Jihad are also taken offline. This is pretty similar. The rules are fairly clear and rational and always have been, the only difference is that they are now enforced and there has been a coup attempt by white supremacists.

Nuzzerino 6y ago

> You needed literal storming of the Capitol and a platform seemingly specifically targeted at those people for this to happen. I fail to see how Parler should be expected to be responsible for the behavior of some users that share a demographic and political alignment with a group that stormed the Capitol. Was the planning for it done via Parler? Was it not Twitter where the announcement by Trump actually happened? The bar is already low my friend. This is nothing but an excuse for big tech to wield its trust effect to shut down potential competitors. If big tech believes that social media companies should be held accountable for its users' actions, then they should support the repeal of section 230, which would effectively have the same effect, except with the additional protections under the justice system. Why is it suddenly okay when big tech does the same without due process? Rules for thee, not for me.

drieddust 6y ago

These companies are sucking up to their new democratic overloads so make sure you do not anger them. Taliban have a twitter account, Ex PM of Malasia have openly justified Paris beheading, Iran's supremo calls for Jew genocide, and last but not the least China calls their Uighur detention camps as "reeducation" with zero consequences. So yes plan if you want but cost of executing the plan might be high enough to put you out of business.

mcguire 6y ago
"Taliban have a twitter account" President Trump came to an agreement with the Taliban, so somebody seems to think they're legitimate. (https://www.reuters.com/article/afghanistan-taliban-usa-int/trump-says-u-s-dealing-well-with-tough-smart-taliban-idUSKBN26934Q https://www.reuters.com/article/afghanistan-taliban-usa-int/...) "Ex PM of Malasia have openly justified Paris beheading" Which comment Twitter removed. (https://www.smh.com.au/world/europe/a-bigot-without-principles-ex-malaysian-pm-condemned-by-former-ambassador-to-france-20201030-p569xn.html https://www.smh.com.au/world/europe/a-bigot-without-principl...)
- drieddust 6y ago
  1. Since when Twitter started complying to Trump? 2. Tweet stayed up until French government got involved. Mahatir is still free to post do it again. What about China and Iran? Last I checked Trump don't like them so why are they up?

bird_monster 6y ago

> I'm struggling to try to understand what this means for the risks of running a business in the cloud going forward. It was not just AWS dropping them, but many of their other vendors dropped them too, essentially killing their business overnight. Businesses that are not terror cells have nothing to worry about. Companies have always pulled away from extremist groups. You wouldn't expect Microsoft to accept a contract with ISIS, would you? This is really not that complicated. Once you attempt to overthrow a country's government, businesses in that country don't want to work with you. This has always been true.

Nuzzerino 6y ago
> Businesses that are not terror cells have nothing to worry about. What is your definition of a terror cell? Do Amazon, Microsoft, and Google qualify as terror cells for competing for billion dollar contracts with the DoD? This is an absurd benchmark with no basis in reality. https://cnbc.com/2019/10/25/microsoft-wins-major-defense-cloud-contract-beating-out-amazon.html https://cnbc.com/2019/10/25/microsoft-wins-major-defense-clo...
- bird_monster 6y ago
  It's really not, and has never been. A group of people literally organized on Facebook and brought guns to overtake the capitol. It's pretty cut and dry. Again, nobody would've expected Microsoft to support ISIS' tech. Businesses have always pulled away from extremist groups like this, as is their right to do. The "whataboutism" on DoD contracts isn't relevant. If your stance is "Our own government is a terror cell", well obviously then our entire society is gone anyway, so why even bother discussing the ethics of tech in america at all? But obviously this stance is just hyperbole in an attempt to dismiss the validity of claiming the rioters as legitimate terrorists. And even by your own example, when has the DoD ever stormed the capitol? Or attempted to overthrow the US government? Spoiler: they haven't. And these insanely silly attempts at implying that legitimate businesses are under the same category as fascist extremists is a joke. This tech precedent pearl clutching is such an insanely bad look it's difficult to even fathom. My assertion is simple: when you try to overthrow a country's government, companies in that country don't want to work with you. The waters are muddier with respect to overthrowing other people's governments, but the DoD has never once attempted to overthrow the US government. There has never been an AWS-supported US coup (before last week). SO the "whatabouts" aren't even relevant.

GCA10 6y ago

I'd expect the bar to remain in exactly the same place. AWS has continued to host the National Enquirer, even after that publication dug deep into Jeff Bezos's personal life. Said coverage perhaps accelerated Bezos's divorce, which cost him $30 billion in stock, as part of the settlement with his ex-wife. ($30b is 2019 valuation; it's much bigger now.) If Amazon/AWS will quietly endure a $30b+ hit to its founder's wealth, without pulling the plug, I'd say the cloud-business risk you've identified should be one of the smallest stressors in your life.

deno 6y ago
Just strategically this doesn’t make any sense as banning National Enquirer would draw 100 times more attention to the story. If Bezos wants revenge he’s surely smart enough to get it quietly. Banning Parler also draws similar attention to it (I’ve never heard of it before today, for one), but it’s a calculated and coordinated (with Google, Apple) move to 1) take them down and 2) send a message to anyone watching. The point is the additional attention here is not unwanted and even desired. Not to mention such a retaliation would have come at a time when Trump (highly critical of Bezos) was still very much in power and had enough support in congress to use it against him.

mcguire 6y ago

Here are the AWS Service Terms (https://aws.amazon.com/service-terms/ https://aws.amazon.com/service-terms/) and the AWS Acceptable Use Policy (https://aws.amazon.com/aup/ https://aws.amazon.com/aup/). You are responsible for understanding and following these as well as the appropriate laws (which probably require the assistance of a lawyer, which I am not, and which is probably a good idea in any case). If a service provider refuses you service and you believe it violates the terms of service that you agreed to (that's going to be a hard row to hoe), you should have legal recourse. (Still not a lawyer, though.) Technically, the safest approach would be to build your own geographically-distributed server facilities and get your own Autonomous System Number. Remember to take care---the legal responsibilities in individual countries differ.

nautilus12 6y ago
The problem is that someone (Parler in this case) would have to actively build automated moderation systems or be philosophically aligned with moderation in order to fulfill the TOS in this case since its the users driving the violation. The baseline shouldn't require them build something, that seems like a burden too far. Suppose the violators were bots, doesn't this mean that anyone that can't build a moderation system to keep up with the bots becomes collateral damage?
- res0nat0r 6y ago
  > doesn't this mean that anyone that can't build a moderation system to keep up with the bots becomes collateral damage? Yes.

crististm 6y ago

Taken from The Book: "don't lend money to someone more powerful than you!". I would say this is a business failure. They should have prepared for that and they did not.

analog31 6y ago

Every week there's a front page story on HN to the tune of "X froze my account and won't tell me why, and their appeal process is totally opaque." I think that to some extent, the availability of multiple providers, and the risk of getting kicked out, are the long term remedy. People will figure out how to mitigate sole-source risks. There might be a risk-reward tradeoff, i.e., the most desirable platforms from a short term profit standpoint might carry the biggest risk of getting shutdown. There will always be somebody who will let you in, at some level of service and security.

shadowgovt 6y ago

Probably to mitigate the way one mitigates against other disasters, such as natural disasters or political upheaval in a nation: have an exit plan to a partitioned cloud environment. Since we're talking political consequences, the partitioning here would be political. Whatever nation owns the companies you do business with, find counterpart companies in nations on poor terms with those host nations and have a plan in place to ramp up infrastructure in those nations quickly (or keep it on "hot standby"). There is the risk that data migration could violate laws in the originating nation, if you're exfiltrating data that the host nation's laws don't allow to be exfiltrated.

ogre_codes 6y ago

> What are the best mitigations here What are you trying to mitigate? You can't mitigate "Getting banned for making a place to plan a coup". You can't mitigate "I want a place to allow posts advocating criminal activity". If people were openly discussing breaking and entering houses, should that be allowed too? Why should we tolerate publicly planning violence when we don't tolerate publicly planning other crimes?

bawolff 6y ago
You can mitigate anything (i dont think you should, but that is a different question). I dont think the original poster was suggesting that type of thing (more a fear of slippery slope), but for the sake of argument, if they were tor hidden services would be the obvious way to mitigate.
- ogre_codes 6y ago
  > You can mitigate anything My point is what this guy seems to want to enable is fundamentally conspiring to commit crimes. He seems to talk around that, but that's where we are.
  - bawolff 6y ago
    I think you're reading in things he did not say. He seems concerned he will be unpopular not illegal. Whether or not that is a reasonable concern is debatable... but history certainly has examples of that sort of thing. That said, there are plenty of websites that do conspire to do illegal acts and seem to get away with it, for a time at least. (pirate bay, sci-hub are two im ok with ethically. The silk road is an example im less ok with)
    - ogre_codes 6y ago
      Parler had no trouble getting in the App Store and AWS when they were perceived as merely espousing an unpopular opinion. Parler was blocked only after there was clear evidence that criminal activity was being openly planned on their platform and that planning was acted on.

JKCalhoun 6y ago

At the risk of sounding snide, it appears that if your business plan is to attract the type of users that foment hate and violence ... you are in a risky business. Anything other than that at this point is a slippery slope fallacy.

nodamage 6y ago

I am not sure why people are treating this like it's new? There is already a massive list of things you can't do on AWS, for example running a spam operation, pirated software trading site, drug trading site, etc. Is it really so surprising that this list also includes running a site where violent attacks are planned?

ehsankia 6y ago
It's not too different from how you should diversify your income as a Youtuber, especially if you make content about controversial topics. They knew that their platform was going to host controversial content, I'm honestly surprised how little redundancy they had planned for here.

bob1029 6y ago

Best mitigation is to involve as few 3rd parties as possible. Find more obscure allies in the space who are not motivated (controlled) by public perception and political gains. Consider building your own tools and technologies to replace 3rd parties. For instance, the load balancing and DDOS protection products sold by Cloudflare are not the effects of some ancient mystical artifact that we could never hope to emulate. These are simple network engineering practices that can be replicated by any experienced IT staff. Sure, you might not be able to mitigate a theoretical 100+ terabit DDOS attack, but is this actually a problem in practice for your business? Even if you have ridiculous capacity, at a certain point you would still have to defer to ISPs, law enforcement and other external measures in order to restore sane operations. Certainly, there is no perfect solution. But, the more of your stack you have under your exclusive physical control the better.

lolc 6y ago
I have no reason to believe that Parler has the means to build infrastructure for DDOS mitigation that compares in any way to Cloudflare. If you're not a multihomed AS, you can't even begin to offer what Cloudflare offers. > But, the more of your stack you have under your exclusive physical control the better. Where's the cutoff? Lay your own fiber to your own datacenters? At some point economy dictates that you rent. And with Parler, I'd assume that that point comes sooner than later. I mean I don't know their funding situation, but I find it reasonable to assume that if they'd built a NOC first they wouldn't have gotten off the ground at all.
- bob1029 6y ago
  Sometimes the trick isn't so much about the technology, but about the regulatory environment and your agility within it. The Pirate Bay is still online, so getting around this kind of thing isn't entirely unprecedented. Something to consider on the tech front would be Starlink. What happens when the orbital layer is independent of terrestrial backhaul under ideal routing conditions? Consider the implications of a datacenter that is in space or located at a geographic location that is incredibly difficult to access. Just a decent desktop PC hooked up to a 100mbps pipe can serve a lot of traffic if the application is built properly (i.e. text-only).

kenjackson 6y ago

Why would the bar be lower in the future? This action is really not something any company wants to do. I expect the bar to remain nearly the same.

bawolff 6y ago

The best mitigation is negotiating strong contracts with significant penalties if the provider does not provide the services promised. Its not like getting screwed over because a vendor changes its mine about fulfilling its obligations half way through is a new issue, this is just a bit of an exceptional case of that.

quickthrowman 6y ago
No provider is going to sign a contract that forces them to host illegal content that opens them up to liability.
- bawolff 6y ago
  Poster never said he intended to host illegal content.
teddyh 6y ago
“Your faith in the legal system is appalling.” https://www.schlockmercenary.com/2009-06-26 https://www.schlockmercenary.com/2009-06-26
- bawolff 6y ago
  Penalties for non performance is like the most standard thing possible in a contract. Its hardly some unfair clause like you agree not to sue ever. Hell, even without a clause specificly stating penalties, you could still probably sue for damages from breaching a contract. (Obviously in the parler case amazon probably didnt breach, but if you are negotiating your own contract it probably wouldn't allow for arbitrary termination with no notice)

jimbob45 6y ago

You’re preaching to the choir. We’ve been having discussions on HN for years about the dangers of swapping the short-term benefits of AWS for the long-term dangers it can bring. I’m sure there’s some Nostradamus on here that predicted this exact situation with Parler. The dangers were obvious and clear to anyone who was paying attention but not everyone was paying attention. Hopefully, this gets managers and CEOs to double-check if the benefits of AWS/EWS truly outweigh the risks.

jacquesm 6y ago

Read the TOS before subscribing to a service would be a good start. And have a plan 'B' and if you plan on starting a revolution maybe have a plan 'C', 'D' and 'E' as well just in case.

imperio59 6y ago

Bullying is real. My wife and I run a side Business Saas product. She is listed as COO on her social media profile for the company. She is also in a bunch of groups about gardening in our local area. During the height of BLM protests and CHOP/CHAZ, someone made a post that was very off-topic for the group, basically saying we should all support what was happening in the CHOP and all the violence against cops was justified due to racial injustice. My wife took no position on the issue but politely replied saying the post felt off-topic and she didn't want to hear about politics in her favorite gardening group. Several people attacked her on the post, calling her white privileged, racist, etc... all for suggesting the post was off-topic (even though the group's own rules prohibited political content). One person took it a step further and went on her profile to see where she worked. They then messaged our company's social media profile to tell our company that my wife was a racist, and she should be fired or reprimanded because she had made racist comments in a FB group (she had not, and the person provided no screenshots/proof either). Unfortunately for that person, they did not realize they were talking to my wife's husband (me) who promptly banned them from our page and blocked their profile from my/my wife's profiles so they could no longer bother us. However, this type of new "online activism" is rampant nowadays. Small companies often have little choice but to comply or be publicly shamed/bullied, including doxxing or going after individual employees, as in our story. I disapprove of this type of behavior. This is mob justice in a different form. It is the court of public opinion rather than an actual court of law where someone would get a chance to defend themselves. It is wrong and our society needs to grow up past this childish phase it's going through where every angry person riled up by this or that party's rhetoric feels like they have the right to attempt to destroy another person's livelihood for the sake of pushing "their truth" or "justice". That's not what Justice is.

jhowell 6y ago
> My wife took no position on the issue but politely replied saying the post felt off-topic and she didn't want to hear about politics in her favorite gardening group. > Several people attacked her on the post, calling her white privileged, racist, etc... all for suggesting the post was off-topic (even though the group's own rules prohibited political content). Isn't the ability to decide what issue your bring to a space and then deciding which issues you'll "take no position" a privilege?

m1sta_ 6y ago

I'm not sure there is a real risk. Slippery slope falacy is easy to reach for here.

nhoughto 6y ago

Kinda interesting as a threat model, if 4chan/the wrong people can maliciously use your service enough to get it cancelled / shutdown just for the lols. I imagine a few startups aren’t building moderating content / moderation teams as part of their MVP..

jounker 6y ago

Don’t run a social network designed to host right wing extremists, and you should be fine.

lightgreen 6y ago
Parler was not "designed to host right wing extremists", same way 1st amendment was not designed to provide free speech to "right wing extremists". It was designed to provide free speech to everyone. And hypothetical right wing extremists occasionally use it same way they use telephones and supermarkets.
- redleader55 6y ago
  This looks a lot like the gun discussion. Some people believe X is just a tool, other people say because X is used for doing bad things, it should be banned. Technically this is exactly the line separating left from right, I don't think there will be a conclusion or agreement on this.
  - lightgreen 6y ago
    > conclusion or agreement on this Agreement may be in discussing hard facts and not assigning emotional labels.

lanevorockz 6y ago

BLM caused the deaths of over 80 people and nobody deplatformed Facebook or Twitter. This is obviously about the belief that republicans are not human.

chess_buster 6y ago
Sure buddy.
TomBombadildoze 6y ago
citation needed
hintymad 6y ago
A nuance: AWS de-platformed Parler for its insufficient moderation on violence-inciting discussion, not for existence of such discussion. Not that I agree with or disagree with AWS decision, but it's worth having a nuanced discussion. A larger problem I see in the US is that many, if not all, nuanced discussions are considered evil by the left or by the right.
gairhgfqiu 6y ago
Have you seen Parlor? It actually hosted and glorified violent videos. In comments, people were celebrating beating of cops. As for BLM, I don't know if they have any central location where they plan any violence and then share videos of that.
heleninboodler 6y ago
I think you're setting an egregiously false equivalence here. BLM didn't openly plan to kill 80 people on Facebook. And if the right-wingers had merely planned to have protests and some crimes happened to be committed at those protests, Parler wouldn't be shut down now.

obviouslynotme 6y ago

If AWS is dropping you, then Facebook, Twitter, and Google probably already have. Stripe, Cloudflare, and Paypal are probably doing the same. If you try to continue, Visa, MasterCard, and your ISP will shut you down next. This is the world we live in now. You can be removed from commerce by a unanimous decision that you will be told never happened. I am just glad I can shut people down hard now when they say, "If you don't like X, then build your own X." I have now watched two Twitter clones and one Patreon clone be shutdown by magical sudden decisions made in lockstep. My guess is that BitChute is next.

jhowell 6y ago
> I have now watched two Twitter clones and one Patreon clone be shutdown by magical sudden decisions made in lockstep. Magical?
- drak0n1c 6y ago
  I believe the commenter is referring to the coordinated collusion of the activity, which is reminiscent of anti-competitive cartels.
  - jhowell 6y ago
    Seems a false equivalent to compare the events that caused these recent terminations to the past, or "magic." What about that should be protected?
res0nat0r 6y ago
Parler obviously only existed to cater to right wing extrimsm and violent rhetoric. It's the reason they "couldn't" moderate it, as if they did there would be no reason for it to exist. Reddit is still around even after r/thedonald and other violent / hateful subreddits were on the site and finally banned. The difference is reddit doesn't primarily exist to foster violence and extremism.
ctvo 6y ago
What unfortunate circumstances we find ourselves in when the cost of doing business with a company associated with white supremacists, insurrectionists, and murderers outweighs the benefits so much that other private businesses won't sell them things. Everyone is entitled to force themselves on Apple, Google, Amazon, Twilio, Stripe, et al., right? I find a depressing majority of the people screaming censorship at the top of their lungs believe people are not entitled to health care or free education in this country. That would be big government. People however are entitled to make you do business with them, even if it's financially damaging to you.

kmeisthax 6y ago

"Every cloud vendor in the world telling you off" is a particular threat model only usually encountered by literal terrorist groups, torrent sites, Sci-Hub... and now right-wing filter-bubbles. In this case, Parler will need to either build all their own infrastructure or sign up with some really skeevy second-world hosting sites. This, interestingly, means being hosted on the same servers that host actual terrorists like Hamas; if they intend to remain a legal corporate outfit their lawyers will probably have some very strong words about using such services. Building your own infrastructure is expensive, even without the particular threat of just being Parler. Notably, net neutrality has been dead in the water ever since Trump took office, so anything high-value becomes extraordinarily expensive fast. I doubt other sites are going to face this same problem in the future. Parler's problem is not that they're on the "wrong side" of a political debate; it's that they deliberately aided and abetted the planning of literal insurrection. Providing any sort of service to them is a huge legal risk to your enterprise now. If the bar for technical deplatforming was lowered beyond "technically legal", you'd see the market for alternative infrastructure providers open up, because those are customers that AWS/Google Cloud/Azure are no longer serving. AWS can only "get away with" deplatforming Parler specifically due to the legally risky nature of working with them.

icare_1er 6y ago

It is easy to see where that trend is going. Little steps by little steps, GAFAs while turn the West in an environment similar to Iran or China when it comes to freedom of speech.

okprod 6y ago

If you a run a business that violates the terms of service of your vendors, be prepared to be cut off. It's like if I rent an apartment and decide to make meth; I shouldn't be surprised if I get evicted.

grahamburger 6y ago

I am optimistic that we won't tumble down the slippery slope. We do need to be careful about it, though, and watch for threats to democracy from all angles. IMO it wouldn't be such a bad thing if this instance weakened the market dominance of SV and gave room in the market for new entrants. Hosting providers outside U.S. jurisdiction, for example, or decentralized social networks.

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mempko 6y ago

President has been set long ago. From child porn, pirating websites, to al-Qaeda websites. There is nothing new about Parler being kicked off hosting sites. It took me five minutes being on the site to see calls for violence.

cphoover 6y ago

> specifically targeted at those people for this to happen. was it though? Wasn't it just a twitter without censorship?

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vivekl 6y ago

This problem would have been even more pronounced if running from a co-lo/non-cloud entity. Imagine getting a court-ordered shutdown or confiscation of servers for evidence etc. Frankly you would expect a "high"-profile/controversial service like Parler to have at least conceived of the possibility of a take-down from a cloud service and had a plan in place for it. Amazon had already cut ties with Gab last year [1] so this should not have been a huge surprise. [1] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/far-right-haven-gabcom-had-its-fundraising-site-shut-down https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/far-right-haven...

bhntr3 6y ago

If you host user-generated content, you will have to decide on community standards and do your best to enforce them. This will be expensive. You are legally obligated to police things like terrorism, child pornography, money laundering and even DMCA violations. You are morally obligated to do more than just that, not just by your conscience, but also by the global zeitgeist. Of course some absurdity lies in making believe your corporation has a conscience. You may have a conscience. But ultimately, no matter what corporate culture you instill, your corporation is a psychopath. So your corporation will be Dexter and you do your best to operate it like it cares about people and issues and is a good citizen (since after all, it is legally a person.) If you do this poorly, it is revealed to have no soul and punished. If you do it well, you get a brand. If covering for a psychopath whose only motivation is money and whose opinions are the amalgamation of half-formed thoughts from hundreds or thousands of different individuals isn't your idea of a good time, then maybe running a business isn't the best idea.

f430 6y ago

Excellent points I agree that this sets a dangerous precedent. > What are the best mitigations here, both technical and social We are witnessing it now on HN. There's a huge uptick in deplatform-proof p2p mesh networks running web applications. How do you take down a mesh network that will simply regenerate and absorb most external shocks? I believe that the future of the internet would be fragmented into a conventional centralized server like we see with AWS dominating the market which will still serve useful purpose for most applications and another for the rest. With Moore's law and 6G we are heading towards a hyper connected world that will facilitate the rise of robust, secure, mesh network based software that runs on our phones. It will not be without trouble, people will find ways to poison the well. The mesh network would evolve into essentially islands where you physically travel to in order to join that private network to minimize DDOS, MITM attacks. It would be a cyberpunkesque reality where to buy a bag of weed in a non-legal state, you simply head towards a dark alley, connect to the mesh network, find the drop, and head back to your tiny apartment occasionally poking your head out the window to take in the sights of foggy neon-lit streets with flying cars and spiky haired gender-neutral entities shouting "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it no more!"

swiley 6y ago

If you build your entire business on a platform controlled by one entity and they decide they don't like you then you better hope none of the debt is secured because that's the end. It's surprising and disappointing how few people get this. It's like the idea that profit requires selling things for more than they cost.

cm2187 6y ago

I find the "overnight" more shocking than terminating a contract. That they would be so callous toward a customer should make anyone think twice before signing up.

lindenksv85 6y ago
I find it highly unlikely that they didn’t have conversations beforehand. It’s also really black and white - they were proud of their lack of moderation and said it publicly. It’s not like there was a misunderstanding. Plus an org like Parler has its own lawyers. There is no way they weren’t warned of their contractual obligations by their own counsel. They just chose to take that risk.
- cm2187 6y ago
  I wasn't under the table but Parler's CEO claims there was no prior notice.

gairhgfqiu 6y ago

How does ISIS and other terrorist orgs host their propaganda? I see a pretty funny future where Trump supporters and ISIS work together to figure out where they can host their content.

Florin_Andrei 6y ago

> However, now that the precedent is set, I would expect the bar to be lowered going forward. That creates risks that need to somehow be mitigated (and reflected in valuations). Ah, yes, the "everything is a slippery slope" propaganda technique.

kingaillas 6y ago

>What are the best mitigations here, both technical and social? Don't violate the terms of service of other businesses you depend on? For all the hard-core libertarian/corporate/free market cheerleaders, isn't this the libertarian way to handle it? CorpA and CorpB have a service agreement/contract, CorpA feels like CorpB violated it, kicks them off, courts handle the aftermath?

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Zelphyr 6y ago

Not to put too fine a point on what you said but since lot of people here are saying, in essence, "Unless you do support storming the Capitol then you have nothing to worry about" I think it's worth highlighting with a concrete example that isn't outside the realm of possibility. Let's say you own a company with about 100 employees. You have never taken a political stand beyond voting. Now let's imagine that two of those employees say something on their personal social media that is insensitive to some. Someone somewhere is going to figure out where those two people work and show up at your digital doorstep. If you as the business owner don't respond in a way that people approve of then those same people are going to go to your vendors such as AWS, etc... and demand they drop you as a customer. If those vendors side with those people strongly enough, or are afraid of them enough, then you may get dropped as quickly as Parler was. Let's be clear on a key distinction here: you're the CEO of a company providing a SaaS product with no relation or affiliation to politics whatsoever, whereas Parler was clearly enabling and encouraging illegal and seditious activity and their being shut down is completely justified. That distinction isn't clear in the minds of a great many people. Especially in today's highly charged political environment.

lindenksv85 6y ago
Either the baker gets to decide whether to make a gay wedding cake or they don’t. Which one is it??
- Zelphyr 6y ago
  That's quite a straw man comparison to the scenario I describe.

ineedasername 6y ago

I think it means that if you blatantly violate their ToS and don't fix it after multiple conversations then you won't be able to use their service.

markdown 6y ago

Parler was filled with posts urging the killing of jews, lefties, BLM supporters, democrats, university professors, and millennials. It should have been dropped a long time ago, as should any platform that allows that kind of talk.

cryptica 6y ago

These days you have to create 'financial incentives' just to get people to do the right thing... Every business is going to need crypto. You need to bribe people into doing the right thing to prevent them from being bribed into doing the wrong thing. It's going to be cheaper to bribe people into doing the right thing than to bribe them into doing the wrong thing... We just have to let good people know that bribing is OK so that bad people don't have a monopoly over it... As is the case today.

deeviant 6y ago

> However, now that the precedent is set, I would expect the bar to be lowered going forward. Why is that? In general, a slippery slope argument is a poor one. > Even for businesses that are not in such politically charged areas, I can easily imagine getting inadvertently tangled up in some popular issue and having vendors become targets of online activist I can imagine a lot of things, I'm sure you can too. But what matters is, is it likely? If, let's say, Slack got taken down by this because it was found that sound rioters used it to coordinate, I would imagine there would be an absolutely huge backlash even today with a situation as dire as the capitol riots. I can't answer your last question, and it is a good question. But I do agree with AWS and others: the answer is not to do nothing.

h3cate 6y ago
They used to say the same thing about wiretaps. Now the government can enter your name into xkeyscore and have access to your life

LockAndLol 6y ago

I would echo the words of that black dude in that show about drugs and cops in Baltimore: "Diversify yo bonds, nigga" aka "Don't put all your eggs in one basket". Apply them to your scenario if you can. Two cloud providers from different countries. Duplicate your data across both, which is good for backups anyway. Maybe try and use chaos computing to stimulate entire data centers going down on you. Parler would've done well to encrypt their data and use some kind of distributed data storage for their usecase. Probably should've gotten servers in Russia, China, Romania or something and maybe even hosted an eep- or onion-site. They were obviously on the fringe and hosting their stuff on mainstream services would've ended badly sooner or later. Know your usecase, know your risks, and prepare accordingly.

PopsiclePete 6y ago

I'm not sure anyone in the (near) future will be able to guarantee you some sort of "right" that you can host/publish whatever you want and not be held accountable. America is a country that prides itself (to an absolute ridiculous fault) on "freedom of speech" and "the free market will handle it". Well, the market handled it, didn't it. When the government fell short, the market stepped in. The last 20 years have polarized society to the breaking point. To think that we can continue down this path and be governable, as a people...it's just not happening. The "free ride" we've enjoyed so far is basically over. Sadly, too many Americans can't tell conspiracy theories and made-up fairy-tales from reality and so now we all lose. The coming administration already has an axe to grind with Big Tech and they will grind it. Both the Left and the Right want to see Big Tech reigned in in some way and even though the reasons might be different, the end result will be the same - host "uncomfortable" content and be censored.

x3iv130f 6y ago

It is a reminder to operate with sensitivity to the laws and customs of the land we do business in, even if we don't agree with it. The days of the internet as a wild west no man's land is over.

thegrimmest 6y ago

It seems like disagreement in any degree can be interpreted as an incitement to violence if you have supporters who are prone to violence. While I support the right of private companies to do as they please, I think that Net Neutrality has a role to play here. The packets I send and whom I send them to should be protected by law in the same way that the letters I send are. It is a crime to open someone else's mail without a warrant, even if that mail contains hate speech or incitement to violence. Private companies who carry mail are not excempt from this restriction, they are content-agnostic. I beleive ISPs fall firmly into this category, and that a strong case may be made for cloud hosting providers as well. With regards to accountability, individuals are accountable for their actions. It was those people who trespassed and committed violence who should be, and it seems will be, held accountable. Those who directly (as in "go here and do this") incited them, or directly planned their actions, committed crimes as well. Those who simply failed to condone them, or who expressed sympathy with their ideals and causes, or who delivered their mail, are not responsible for the actions of those people.

tonfreed 6y ago

This debate has been happening since Anglin and Cloudflare. There was a similar discussion when Lauren Southern was banned from Patreon, and Laura Loomer isn't even allowed to order an Uber anymore. This will become more common, all it will take will be an allegation even without proof and you'll be denied all services.

stubish 6y ago

> I'm struggling to try to understand what this means for the risks of running a business in the cloud going forward. This is nothing new, and the risks of running a business are the same. If your suppliers drop your business, you have to find a new supplier or you are dead. And you get to decide if you want to chase compensation in the courts (breach of contract, persecution based on protected classes such as politics or race) or not. The suppliers who are not allowed to drop you are regulated and called utilities. AWS dropping the ban hammer here is interesting, as the end result might end up with cloud services getting regulated and defined as a utility.

totalZero 6y ago

Parler isn't the first app to get cut from app/play store, and it's not the first online service to be given the cold shoulder by its infrastructure providers. If you rely on a provider, don't motivate the provider to end its relationship with you. The best mitigation here is, first, don't cater to fascists who want to tear apart the fabric of American society. Second, if you're going to piss people off, either set up a contract that doesn't give your infrastructure provider the freedom to end its relationship with you, or do without the benefits of cloud. AWS isn't a utility, and its services are largely replaceable -- buy some computers and set up your own servers.

ca98am79 6y ago

Technically the best mitigation is to use a decentralized service that cannot be censored. Socially the best mitigation is the same as always, be honest and peaceful.