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> 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 be

by 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.
- Blahah 6y ago
  It really isn't a straw man. If clients or customers bring bad publicity to a company they can refuse them service. They can in fact refuse service for any reason that isn't discriminatory in many jurisdictions. Censorship has nothing to do with this. Any person can host a website from home, pay for a dedicated line, build their own datacenter, find a colo, host on a decentralised network, etc. Amazon is under no obligation to provide service to Parler. They are not censored by Amazon refusing them as customers. It's also not relevant to antitrust, literally at all. A far more dangerous precedent would be compelling companies to provide service to hate groups and terrorists.
  - h3cate 6y ago
    I must of missed the section of the parler site that said it was a hate group or terrorist organisation..
- adrr 6y ago
  Parler wasn’t deleted because of public pressure alone. It was deleted because of AWS customers that threatened to leave. Last thing large enterprise customers want is to be caught up in is a controversy. Amazon made a business decision. No tech executive wants to explain to their CEO that they got boycotted due to a tech vendor choice. If AWs didn’t kick off Parler, the boycott of AWS based customers was coming. No company should be forced to lose money.
  - lightgreen 6y ago
    > It was deleted because of AWS customers that threatened to leave. What is the source of that statement? I did not find anything confirming that.
jlkuester7 6y ago
> not everything is a slippery slope From a risk management perspective, this does not seem like a safe assumption to make. The DailyStormer got "canceled" by vendors for not even trying to moderate content that actively promoted violence (among other horrible things). Now Parlor gets "canceled" by vendors for not doing a good enough job trying to moderate content promoting violence. The bar for getting "canceled" is already moving down and honestly any company that is hosting user-driven content needs to have a plan for how to make sure they stay below that bar. Part of that plan should be projected scenarios about how low the bar will go.... Part of what is really dicey here too is that the result of getting this calculation wrong is basically annihilation for your service (unless you think you can operate without "every vendor from text message services to email providers to our lawyers"). The stakes are really high! (Edited to fix my 'raise-the-bar' analogy)
- Daishiman 6y ago
  No, parlor wasn't even doing a "good enough job". It wasn't doing _anything_. It's financial backers supported everything with regards to its users going into a violent frenzy. There really is nothing contentious here, unless you feel that if you know that a group is organizing in your platform with the intent of staging a coup then you're in your right to just let them go about it.
  - paganel 6y ago
    > It's financial backers supported everything with regards to its users going into a violent frenzy. The financial backers of Facebook supported the company a lot through its enabling of the Rohingya genocide. But, then again, the Rohingya are not white, nor Christian, and they don't live in a country that can be a potential source of expats (like the UK or Australia, nice, good countries), only of immigrants.
  - larrywright 6y ago
    There are lots of horrible things on Parler from what I’ve seen (I don’t have an account, I’ve just seen screen shots). The most egregious example was the post from Trump attorney Lin Wood calling for Pence to be executed by firing squad. It was up for days, and only taken down when this all blew up.
ekianjo 6y ago
> don't attempt to overturn a fair democratic election and install an illegitimate government. Erm, was Parler as a platform even doing that? Or you know, PEOPLE on the platform, which is not the exact same thing?
- pixl97 6y ago
  Turns out you should keep those attempting to over throw democratic elections off your service.
  - jessaustin 6y ago
    Ouch, that's going to hurt. USA government is a pretty big customer. Or do we not care about democratic elections in Venezuela, Bolivia, Brazil, Egypt, etc.?
    - sildur 6y ago
      No, we don't. I thought trying not to shit in the same place you eat was common sense, yet here we are...
- sildur 6y ago
  At some point it is the same thing. By act or omission.
- myko 6y ago
  The platform refused to moderate that content. In fact it was its raison d'étre.
fasdf1122 6y ago
Nope. Decentralized services will be very important moving forward. Most people just haven't realized it yet.
- sildur 6y ago
  What works for Al Qaeda could work for Y'all Qaeda, who knows.
trendoid 6y ago
AWS's letter to Parler explains quite well why they are taking them down and I don't see any rational argument against it https://twitter.com/karaswisher/status/1348136296976408576/photo/1 https://twitter.com/karaswisher/status/1348136296976408576/p...
RspecMAuthortah 6y ago
> 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. Ohhhh. You hear that? Overturning a fair democratic election. Where was the same argument when the whole Russia narrative played out - including intelligence agencies trying to "wire" the sitting president and sending agents to his national security advisor's residence to frame him? And trying to plot 25th amendment. And the whole 3years subsequent to that trying to find "collusion". Also there is no evidence the founders of Parler were actively trying to sabotage the election and install illegitimate president. Some rouge users decided to co-ordinate through apps like Parler and FB. Same applies for FB.
- JakeTheAndroid 6y ago
  If we want to continue down a path of honest discussion, at no point did people who firmly believed Trump was guilty of collusion with Russia devolve into storming a government building. And, the Russia topic by and large never called into question the legitimacy of the ballots cast, attempting to disenfranchise voters. The Russia narrative followed a path of legal investigation into questionable situations. Trump did not get impeached for the outcomes of the Mueller report. Dems did not force their way into political buildings. They (at least the mainstream ones) never called for violence. So, it seems that the left, in the end, did believe it was a fair election in terms of ballot numbers, and never suggested that the democratic election be overturned. The last part of your statement says something entirely different than the first part. I don't think anyone is claiming that Dems haven't worked hard to undermine Trump during his time in office. Just like I don't think anyone claimed Republicans weren't working to undermine Obama when they took control of the Senate. That's politics, good or bad. But that does not correlate to a belief that a fair election should be overturned. Not really an apt comparison in my opinion.
- chess_buster 6y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mueller_report https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mueller_report
Consultant32452 6y ago
> For now, don't attempt to overturn a fair democratic election and install an illegitimate government. I agree 100%, viking hat guy should definitely have his AWS account terminated. Now, let's talk about Russiagate, how the FBI knew it was a fabrication of the opposition party to distract from a campaign scandal, and how we were dragged all the way through an impeachment process in an attempt to install an illegitimate government.
- FentanylFloyd 6y ago
  you are not supposed to mention this, your hackernews and aws account should be terminated for wrongthink and don't forget: BLM "protests" were "fiery, but mostly peaceful" https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/035/101/CNN_Mostly_Peaceful_Protests_Banner.jpg https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/035/101/CNN...
Closi 6y ago
> 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 don't think it is though - the point is who decides if the democratic election was fair? What happens in a foreign country if their government decides the election isn't fair? Should people be silenced? Or is it Amazon's job now to work out if worldwide elections are fair and enforce action? I think the problem is either you are a neutral platform, or you hold too much power.
- Tepix 6y ago
  > the point is who decides if the democratic election was fair? That one is easy: it was approximately 60 different courts of law that laughed the "evidence" of fraud out of the room
  - eloff 6y ago
    It's not that easy. If we're talking about an election in Venezuela, the courts would also laugh accusations of election rigging out of the room. To be clear, I fully side with the U.S. courts here. What I'm saying though is governments and officials lie, you can't always just trust the official story. If parler were used for inciting civil disorder in Venezuela over the election result and the government comes to AWS and says shut them down, what do they do? Now suddenly they're the arbitrators of what is true in the world. I don't want to get too hypothetical here, because I think this time it was pretty black and white.
    - Closi 6y ago
      100% agree - And the problem is that this isn't a 'hypothetical' situation. Amazon and these large players will absolutely be asked by governments around the world to intervene in similar situations. Sometimes the fraud will be false, but sometimes it will be real - that's the world. Is it now Amazon's job to be the world election supervisor and arbiter of truth and shut down dissenting speech? And can we trust these companies to act as neutral arbiters of the truth? (As an aside, the answer is absolutely not. See: Google Maps and Crimea / Ukraine / Russia)
scaredthrow1112 6y ago
Thank you for saying this. Personally I'm fine with there being rules against things like websites for how to make a pipe bomb or as you mentioned, overthrow the government
baybal2 6y ago
> What are the best mitigations here, both technical and social? Buy a server?
- disgrunt 6y ago
  Buy a server where?
  - baybal2 6y ago
    On eBay, maybe?
roenxi 6y ago
It sounds very reasonable up until attempting to identify what, objectively, is the bar to set business policy. Twitter literally claims that "To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th." was the straw that broke the camels back [0]. That isn't an objective bar. Context which "everyone knows" is a political question - a highly political question. If AWS happens to have a similar standard to Twitter then the only way for a business to figure out if it is in breach is by experiment, and AWS just showed it can pull the plug in days with apparently no warning. [0] https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/suspension.html https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/suspensio...
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- jandrese 6y ago
  Maybe it was the part where he directed an angry mob to the steps of the Capitol building?
  - um_ya 6y ago
    I just don't understand the double standards. What about the antifa/blm mobs that swept the country these last few months? As a matter of principle, they would have to ban them as well.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - nameistaken 6y ago
      Sigh.
      - brailsafe 6y ago
        Sigh.
- 0xEFF 6y ago
hitpointdrew 6y ago
>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. Parler didn't do this, it's users did. Vastly different things.
- disgrunt 6y ago
  Which has always been Twitter's defense when similar things happened on their platform. Shouldn't 230 apply here?
WindyLakeReturn 6y ago
But that isn't the standard that was used. It seems to be something more akin to 'don't not moderate content that encourages...'. Except it isn't quite clear what moderation is considered good enough, as one can look at other sites which hosted and continue to host similar content. Sure, they haven't taken the stance they won't moderate, but they haven't done enough to moderate the content to remove it. Or is it that stance? Perhaps that was the defining standard, that they took a stance instead of passively allowing it to remain like other sites do (until called out, at which point they'll react based on the size of the call out).
golemotron 6y ago
> I get the concern you're expressing, but not everything is a slippery slope This won't age well.
BHSPitMonkey 6y ago
> 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. This is key advice that a lot of founders seem to forget. Capturing a capital is an extremely bold and risky action, which shouldn't be attempted by anyone with fewer than 4 or 5 high-production cities of their own (some of which ideally also having an Encampment district to support training siege units faster). I encourage new players to focus on obtaining a scientific or cultural victory instead, as these are more straightforward for beginners.
mmmmmbop 6y ago
> For now, don't attempt to overturn a fair democratic election and install an illegitimate government. I honestly have no political axe to grind here, but I distinctly remember how 4 years ago it was a legitimate talking point on the losing side that 'faithless electors' (or 'Hamilton electors') should step up to deny Trump the presidency ([1], [2]). Michael Moore offered to pay the resulting fines for any Republican faithless electors [3]. To me as an outside observer those seemed like attempts to overturn a fair democratic election and install an illegitimate government. However, neither the politics subreddit nor Michael Moore have been deplatformed. So I'm not sure the criterion you mentioned is entirely correct. [1] https://old.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/5gpmru/first_republican_faithless_elector_announces/ https://old.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/5gpmru/first_repu... [2] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/11/meet-the-hamilton-electors-hoping-for-an-electoral-college-revolt/508433/ https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/11/meet-th... [3] https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/michael-moore-appeals-gop-electors-rogue-pay-state/story?id=44276931 https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/michael-moore-appeals-gop-el...
- eli_gottlieb 6y ago
  To be fair, Michael Moore didn't try to assassinate the Vice President and hold Senators for ransom.
  - h3cate 6y ago
    Were either of those things attempted?
- sellyme 6y ago
  Also an outside observer, isn't the ability to do that the entire point of having electors in the first place? As terrible as the electoral system is, it wouldn't be illegitimate to use it for its intended purpose.
  - mmmmmbop 6y ago
    I strongly believe that if Trump or one of his surrogates had tried to bribe electors into certifying him as a winner in 2020, it would have been rightly called an attempted coup and not a legitimate use of the electoral system.
imgabe 6y ago
> For now, don't attempt to overturn a fair democratic election and install an illegitimate government. Step back for a moment and ask yourself honestly: do you really believe, in your heart of hearts, that there was even the slightest, faintest, remotest chance of the dude in the viking outfit overthrowing the US government? It was a violent protest that got way out of hand, absolutely. There was never even the slightest chance of the government being overthrown though. It's like someone dropped a cigarette butt on the ground and people are leaping on the opportunity to call it attempted arson.
- simondw 6y ago
  What about the dude with the zip ties and sidearm? What about the dudes who left IEDs in the building? What about the crowd who beat a police officer to death? No, of course the dude in the viking outfit wasn't going to single-handedly overthrow the government. There was a very real possibility that members of Congress would have been murdered for political reasons by a very large, violent, deadly crowd.
- teachrdan 6y ago
  The mob of people who stormed the Capitol building beat a police officer to death. If the mob had reached the rooms with Nancy Pelosi and Mike Pence, I think they would have been assaulted, too, killing them by accident or deliberately. That would have triggered a Constitutional crisis which could have given Trump grounds to keep power. Was this a well thought out plan? No. But would it have been enough to derail the process of formally choosing the next President? Quite possibly.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- namesbc 6y ago
  You are deflecting from the armed militia attempting to breach the house and senate chambers while the lynch mob chants for blood.
- criddell 6y ago
gulag4nerds 6y ago
> For now, don't attempt to overturn a fair democratic election and install an illegitimate government. In the US. For countries we don't like, coup away.
VoodooJuJu 6y ago
>attempt to... install an illegitimate government I keep seeing this claim, and it's quite a substantial claim, but I don't see equally substantial evidence to support it. I see evidence of disgruntled LARP'ers forming an angry mob and causing more trouble than anyone would want, but I don't see evidence of an armed rebellion in a sustained firefight or siege, with all the explosions, rubble, chaos, and loss of life that accompanies an uprising, with the explicit goal of installing a new government. Is this claim misinformation? Should it be censored?
- XorNot 6y ago
  Failing to succeed at your coup doesn't mean that wasn't what you were attempting to do. Being stupid about it has never been a criminal defense. "Attempted murder" is still a felony (and you know, the crowd actually murdered a capitol police officer).
- vegannet 6y ago
  They literally erected gallows on the grounds of the capitol, they literally marched through the building chanting "hang Mike Pence". The entire basis of the Q Anon conspiracy is that Donald Trump is preparing to destroy the deep state and retain power. Spend more than a few minutes browsing around Gab (you can just look at the top posts) and you'll see explicit references to overthrowing the government. You can absolutely argue that this was a laughable attempt to install an illegitimate government and you can absolutely argue that they have no chance of succeeding, but you can't argue it isn't the intent -- it's the entire basis of the Q Anon conspiracy. The laughable nature of their attempt doesn't disprove the intent.
  - h3cate 6y ago
    Didn't BLM install gallows outside Jeff bezos house or something like that? Were they trying to overthrow Amazon?
    - lindenksv85 6y ago
      If so, that would be a crime and those people should have been arrested. So what? I love the conservative view that if any liberal anywhere did anything bad, then it’s a get out of jail card for them to also do that bad thing. No dude. A crime is a crime.
XorNot 6y ago
> but not everything is a slippery slope. This is indeed why it is called the "slippery slope fallacy". It's a fallacy because the implication of a "slippery slope" is that once the merits of this specific idea are evaluated, then all subsequent ideas following will be implemented immediately without a separate debate and discussion of the merits of those ideas. Pursuant to the current issue: if you're not planning on running a "somewhat moderated" platform where you'll host content calling for violence against the current government representatives, resulting in an actual attempt at a coup...then you've nothing to worry about.
- desmosxxx 6y ago
  It's only called a fallacy if it's a fallacy. Slippery slope arguments, despite your ignorance, are not inherently facetious.
giantg2 6y ago
"... something that is more genuinely a popular social issue ..." We shouldn't let minority rights or freedoms be ignored just because they aren't popular. If this is an important issue to that other person, then they should bring it up for discussion.
throwaway0a5e 6y ago
>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. There's a bakery somewhere that wasn't controversial until they were. In this day and age you can become the subject of a national controversy overnight.
- lindenksv85 6y ago
  There is a big difference between “controversial” and a place where people are actively planning criminal activity. It’s not close. No bank, for example, could continue serving a known crime org. They themselves would be charged if they did that.
h3cate 6y ago
Did parler really try and overturn an election? Or did some of the people that use the site walk around a building?
- Jochim 6y ago
  I didn't know it was common to bludgeon police officers to death on your morning walk.
- Frondo 6y ago
  People also left IEDs in the building, walked around with weapons and zip-ties, chanted "Hang Mike Pence," and did a lot of property damage. Please don't downplay what happened on Jan 6 as "walk around a building," it's absurd and that kind of equivocation doesn't belong here.
taurath 6y ago
Here's the deal from my perspective - if you build a platform you are responsible to have tools to take down clearly illegal activity on the platform, such as plotting the murder of politicians, terrorism, money laundering, etc. This seems... reasonable to me, even though I understand some tools can/could be misused. In the end its not great that we have to sort of depend on societal ideas of what is right/wrong in the form of social/reputational pressure to moderate things, but at the moment we're at least a bit more likely to not turn that on marginalized groups than at any other time.

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.
Blahah 6y ago
It really isn't a straw man. If clients or customers bring bad publicity to a company they can refuse them service. They can in fact refuse service for any reason that isn't discriminatory in many jurisdictions. Censorship has nothing to do with this. Any person can host a website from home, pay for a dedicated line, build their own datacenter, find a colo, host on a decentralised network, etc. Amazon is under no obligation to provide service to Parler. They are not censored by Amazon refusing them as customers. It's also not relevant to antitrust, literally at all. A far more dangerous precedent would be compelling companies to provide service to hate groups and terrorists.
- h3cate 6y ago
  I must of missed the section of the parler site that said it was a hate group or terrorist organisation..
adrr 6y ago
Parler wasn’t deleted because of public pressure alone. It was deleted because of AWS customers that threatened to leave. Last thing large enterprise customers want is to be caught up in is a controversy. Amazon made a business decision. No tech executive wants to explain to their CEO that they got boycotted due to a tech vendor choice. If AWs didn’t kick off Parler, the boycott of AWS based customers was coming. No company should be forced to lose money.
- lightgreen 6y ago
  > It was deleted because of AWS customers that threatened to leave. What is the source of that statement? I did not find anything confirming that.

jlkuester7 6y ago

> not everything is a slippery slope From a risk management perspective, this does not seem like a safe assumption to make. The DailyStormer got "canceled" by vendors for not even trying to moderate content that actively promoted violence (among other horrible things). Now Parlor gets "canceled" by vendors for not doing a good enough job trying to moderate content promoting violence. The bar for getting "canceled" is already moving down and honestly any company that is hosting user-driven content needs to have a plan for how to make sure they stay below that bar. Part of that plan should be projected scenarios about how low the bar will go.... Part of what is really dicey here too is that the result of getting this calculation wrong is basically annihilation for your service (unless you think you can operate without "every vendor from text message services to email providers to our lawyers"). The stakes are really high! (Edited to fix my 'raise-the-bar' analogy)

Daishiman 6y ago
No, parlor wasn't even doing a "good enough job". It wasn't doing _anything_. It's financial backers supported everything with regards to its users going into a violent frenzy. There really is nothing contentious here, unless you feel that if you know that a group is organizing in your platform with the intent of staging a coup then you're in your right to just let them go about it.
- paganel 6y ago
  > It's financial backers supported everything with regards to its users going into a violent frenzy. The financial backers of Facebook supported the company a lot through its enabling of the Rohingya genocide. But, then again, the Rohingya are not white, nor Christian, and they don't live in a country that can be a potential source of expats (like the UK or Australia, nice, good countries), only of immigrants.
- larrywright 6y ago
  There are lots of horrible things on Parler from what I’ve seen (I don’t have an account, I’ve just seen screen shots). The most egregious example was the post from Trump attorney Lin Wood calling for Pence to be executed by firing squad. It was up for days, and only taken down when this all blew up.

ekianjo 6y ago

> don't attempt to overturn a fair democratic election and install an illegitimate government. Erm, was Parler as a platform even doing that? Or you know, PEOPLE on the platform, which is not the exact same thing?

pixl97 6y ago
Turns out you should keep those attempting to over throw democratic elections off your service.
- jessaustin 6y ago
  Ouch, that's going to hurt. USA government is a pretty big customer. Or do we not care about democratic elections in Venezuela, Bolivia, Brazil, Egypt, etc.?
  - sildur 6y ago
    No, we don't. I thought trying not to shit in the same place you eat was common sense, yet here we are...
sildur 6y ago
At some point it is the same thing. By act or omission.
myko 6y ago
The platform refused to moderate that content. In fact it was its raison d'étre.

fasdf1122 6y ago

Nope. Decentralized services will be very important moving forward. Most people just haven't realized it yet.

sildur 6y ago
What works for Al Qaeda could work for Y'all Qaeda, who knows.

trendoid 6y ago

AWS's letter to Parler explains quite well why they are taking them down and I don't see any rational argument against it https://twitter.com/karaswisher/status/1348136296976408576/photo/1 https://twitter.com/karaswisher/status/1348136296976408576/p...

RspecMAuthortah 6y ago

> 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. Ohhhh. You hear that? Overturning a fair democratic election. Where was the same argument when the whole Russia narrative played out - including intelligence agencies trying to "wire" the sitting president and sending agents to his national security advisor's residence to frame him? And trying to plot 25th amendment. And the whole 3years subsequent to that trying to find "collusion". Also there is no evidence the founders of Parler were actively trying to sabotage the election and install illegitimate president. Some rouge users decided to co-ordinate through apps like Parler and FB. Same applies for FB.

JakeTheAndroid 6y ago
If we want to continue down a path of honest discussion, at no point did people who firmly believed Trump was guilty of collusion with Russia devolve into storming a government building. And, the Russia topic by and large never called into question the legitimacy of the ballots cast, attempting to disenfranchise voters. The Russia narrative followed a path of legal investigation into questionable situations. Trump did not get impeached for the outcomes of the Mueller report. Dems did not force their way into political buildings. They (at least the mainstream ones) never called for violence. So, it seems that the left, in the end, did believe it was a fair election in terms of ballot numbers, and never suggested that the democratic election be overturned. The last part of your statement says something entirely different than the first part. I don't think anyone is claiming that Dems haven't worked hard to undermine Trump during his time in office. Just like I don't think anyone claimed Republicans weren't working to undermine Obama when they took control of the Senate. That's politics, good or bad. But that does not correlate to a belief that a fair election should be overturned. Not really an apt comparison in my opinion.
chess_buster 6y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mueller_report https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mueller_report

Consultant32452 6y ago

> For now, don't attempt to overturn a fair democratic election and install an illegitimate government. I agree 100%, viking hat guy should definitely have his AWS account terminated. Now, let's talk about Russiagate, how the FBI knew it was a fabrication of the opposition party to distract from a campaign scandal, and how we were dragged all the way through an impeachment process in an attempt to install an illegitimate government.

FentanylFloyd 6y ago
you are not supposed to mention this, your hackernews and aws account should be terminated for wrongthink and don't forget: BLM "protests" were "fiery, but mostly peaceful" https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/035/101/CNN_Mostly_Peaceful_Protests_Banner.jpg https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/035/101/CNN...

Closi 6y ago

> 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 don't think it is though - the point is who decides if the democratic election was fair? What happens in a foreign country if their government decides the election isn't fair? Should people be silenced? Or is it Amazon's job now to work out if worldwide elections are fair and enforce action? I think the problem is either you are a neutral platform, or you hold too much power.

Tepix 6y ago
> the point is who decides if the democratic election was fair? That one is easy: it was approximately 60 different courts of law that laughed the "evidence" of fraud out of the room
- eloff 6y ago
  It's not that easy. If we're talking about an election in Venezuela, the courts would also laugh accusations of election rigging out of the room. To be clear, I fully side with the U.S. courts here. What I'm saying though is governments and officials lie, you can't always just trust the official story. If parler were used for inciting civil disorder in Venezuela over the election result and the government comes to AWS and says shut them down, what do they do? Now suddenly they're the arbitrators of what is true in the world. I don't want to get too hypothetical here, because I think this time it was pretty black and white.
  - Closi 6y ago
    100% agree - And the problem is that this isn't a 'hypothetical' situation. Amazon and these large players will absolutely be asked by governments around the world to intervene in similar situations. Sometimes the fraud will be false, but sometimes it will be real - that's the world. Is it now Amazon's job to be the world election supervisor and arbiter of truth and shut down dissenting speech? And can we trust these companies to act as neutral arbiters of the truth? (As an aside, the answer is absolutely not. See: Google Maps and Crimea / Ukraine / Russia)

scaredthrow1112 6y ago

Thank you for saying this. Personally I'm fine with there being rules against things like websites for how to make a pipe bomb or as you mentioned, overthrow the government

baybal2 6y ago

> What are the best mitigations here, both technical and social? Buy a server?

disgrunt 6y ago
Buy a server where?
- baybal2 6y ago
  On eBay, maybe?

roenxi 6y ago

It sounds very reasonable up until attempting to identify what, objectively, is the bar to set business policy. Twitter literally claims that "To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th." was the straw that broke the camels back [0]. That isn't an objective bar. Context which "everyone knows" is a political question - a highly political question. If AWS happens to have a similar standard to Twitter then the only way for a business to figure out if it is in breach is by experiment, and AWS just showed it can pull the plug in days with apparently no warning. [0] https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/suspension.html https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/suspensio...

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
jandrese 6y ago
Maybe it was the part where he directed an angry mob to the steps of the Capitol building?
- um_ya 6y ago
  I just don't understand the double standards. What about the antifa/blm mobs that swept the country these last few months? As a matter of principle, they would have to ban them as well.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - nameistaken 6y ago
    Sigh.
    - brailsafe 6y ago
      Sigh.
0xEFF 6y ago

hitpointdrew 6y ago

>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. Parler didn't do this, it's users did. Vastly different things.

disgrunt 6y ago
Which has always been Twitter's defense when similar things happened on their platform. Shouldn't 230 apply here?

WindyLakeReturn 6y ago

But that isn't the standard that was used. It seems to be something more akin to 'don't not moderate content that encourages...'. Except it isn't quite clear what moderation is considered good enough, as one can look at other sites which hosted and continue to host similar content. Sure, they haven't taken the stance they won't moderate, but they haven't done enough to moderate the content to remove it. Or is it that stance? Perhaps that was the defining standard, that they took a stance instead of passively allowing it to remain like other sites do (until called out, at which point they'll react based on the size of the call out).

golemotron 6y ago

> I get the concern you're expressing, but not everything is a slippery slope This won't age well.

BHSPitMonkey 6y ago

> 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. This is key advice that a lot of founders seem to forget. Capturing a capital is an extremely bold and risky action, which shouldn't be attempted by anyone with fewer than 4 or 5 high-production cities of their own (some of which ideally also having an Encampment district to support training siege units faster). I encourage new players to focus on obtaining a scientific or cultural victory instead, as these are more straightforward for beginners.

mmmmmbop 6y ago

> For now, don't attempt to overturn a fair democratic election and install an illegitimate government. I honestly have no political axe to grind here, but I distinctly remember how 4 years ago it was a legitimate talking point on the losing side that 'faithless electors' (or 'Hamilton electors') should step up to deny Trump the presidency ([1], [2]). Michael Moore offered to pay the resulting fines for any Republican faithless electors [3]. To me as an outside observer those seemed like attempts to overturn a fair democratic election and install an illegitimate government. However, neither the politics subreddit nor Michael Moore have been deplatformed. So I'm not sure the criterion you mentioned is entirely correct. [1] https://old.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/5gpmru/first_republican_faithless_elector_announces/ https://old.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/5gpmru/first_repu... [2] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/11/meet-the-hamilton-electors-hoping-for-an-electoral-college-revolt/508433/ https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/11/meet-th... [3] https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/michael-moore-appeals-gop-electors-rogue-pay-state/story?id=44276931 https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/michael-moore-appeals-gop-el...

eli_gottlieb 6y ago
To be fair, Michael Moore didn't try to assassinate the Vice President and hold Senators for ransom.
- h3cate 6y ago
  Were either of those things attempted?
sellyme 6y ago
Also an outside observer, isn't the ability to do that the entire point of having electors in the first place? As terrible as the electoral system is, it wouldn't be illegitimate to use it for its intended purpose.
- mmmmmbop 6y ago
  I strongly believe that if Trump or one of his surrogates had tried to bribe electors into certifying him as a winner in 2020, it would have been rightly called an attempted coup and not a legitimate use of the electoral system.

imgabe 6y ago

> For now, don't attempt to overturn a fair democratic election and install an illegitimate government. Step back for a moment and ask yourself honestly: do you really believe, in your heart of hearts, that there was even the slightest, faintest, remotest chance of the dude in the viking outfit overthrowing the US government? It was a violent protest that got way out of hand, absolutely. There was never even the slightest chance of the government being overthrown though. It's like someone dropped a cigarette butt on the ground and people are leaping on the opportunity to call it attempted arson.

simondw 6y ago
What about the dude with the zip ties and sidearm? What about the dudes who left IEDs in the building? What about the crowd who beat a police officer to death? No, of course the dude in the viking outfit wasn't going to single-handedly overthrow the government. There was a very real possibility that members of Congress would have been murdered for political reasons by a very large, violent, deadly crowd.
teachrdan 6y ago
The mob of people who stormed the Capitol building beat a police officer to death. If the mob had reached the rooms with Nancy Pelosi and Mike Pence, I think they would have been assaulted, too, killing them by accident or deliberately. That would have triggered a Constitutional crisis which could have given Trump grounds to keep power. Was this a well thought out plan? No. But would it have been enough to derail the process of formally choosing the next President? Quite possibly.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
namesbc 6y ago
You are deflecting from the armed militia attempting to breach the house and senate chambers while the lynch mob chants for blood.
criddell 6y ago

gulag4nerds 6y ago

> For now, don't attempt to overturn a fair democratic election and install an illegitimate government. In the US. For countries we don't like, coup away.

VoodooJuJu 6y ago

>attempt to... install an illegitimate government I keep seeing this claim, and it's quite a substantial claim, but I don't see equally substantial evidence to support it. I see evidence of disgruntled LARP'ers forming an angry mob and causing more trouble than anyone would want, but I don't see evidence of an armed rebellion in a sustained firefight or siege, with all the explosions, rubble, chaos, and loss of life that accompanies an uprising, with the explicit goal of installing a new government. Is this claim misinformation? Should it be censored?

XorNot 6y ago
Failing to succeed at your coup doesn't mean that wasn't what you were attempting to do. Being stupid about it has never been a criminal defense. "Attempted murder" is still a felony (and you know, the crowd actually murdered a capitol police officer).
vegannet 6y ago
They literally erected gallows on the grounds of the capitol, they literally marched through the building chanting "hang Mike Pence". The entire basis of the Q Anon conspiracy is that Donald Trump is preparing to destroy the deep state and retain power. Spend more than a few minutes browsing around Gab (you can just look at the top posts) and you'll see explicit references to overthrowing the government. You can absolutely argue that this was a laughable attempt to install an illegitimate government and you can absolutely argue that they have no chance of succeeding, but you can't argue it isn't the intent -- it's the entire basis of the Q Anon conspiracy. The laughable nature of their attempt doesn't disprove the intent.
- h3cate 6y ago
  Didn't BLM install gallows outside Jeff bezos house or something like that? Were they trying to overthrow Amazon?
  - lindenksv85 6y ago
    If so, that would be a crime and those people should have been arrested. So what? I love the conservative view that if any liberal anywhere did anything bad, then it’s a get out of jail card for them to also do that bad thing. No dude. A crime is a crime.

XorNot 6y ago

> but not everything is a slippery slope. This is indeed why it is called the "slippery slope fallacy". It's a fallacy because the implication of a "slippery slope" is that once the merits of this specific idea are evaluated, then all subsequent ideas following will be implemented immediately without a separate debate and discussion of the merits of those ideas. Pursuant to the current issue: if you're not planning on running a "somewhat moderated" platform where you'll host content calling for violence against the current government representatives, resulting in an actual attempt at a coup...then you've nothing to worry about.

desmosxxx 6y ago
It's only called a fallacy if it's a fallacy. Slippery slope arguments, despite your ignorance, are not inherently facetious.

giantg2 6y ago

"... something that is more genuinely a popular social issue ..." We shouldn't let minority rights or freedoms be ignored just because they aren't popular. If this is an important issue to that other person, then they should bring it up for discussion.

throwaway0a5e 6y ago

>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. There's a bakery somewhere that wasn't controversial until they were. In this day and age you can become the subject of a national controversy overnight.

lindenksv85 6y ago
There is a big difference between “controversial” and a place where people are actively planning criminal activity. It’s not close. No bank, for example, could continue serving a known crime org. They themselves would be charged if they did that.

h3cate 6y ago

Did parler really try and overturn an election? Or did some of the people that use the site walk around a building?

Jochim 6y ago
I didn't know it was common to bludgeon police officers to death on your morning walk.
Frondo 6y ago
People also left IEDs in the building, walked around with weapons and zip-ties, chanted "Hang Mike Pence," and did a lot of property damage. Please don't downplay what happened on Jan 6 as "walk around a building," it's absurd and that kind of equivocation doesn't belong here.

taurath 6y ago

Here's the deal from my perspective - if you build a platform you are responsible to have tools to take down clearly illegal activity on the platform, such as plotting the murder of politicians, terrorism, money laundering, etc. This seems... reasonable to me, even though I understand some tools can/could be misused. In the end its not great that we have to sort of depend on societal ideas of what is right/wrong in the form of social/reputational pressure to moderate things, but at the moment we're at least a bit more likely to not turn that on marginalized groups than at any other time.