20 ms·

> 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

> 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.
  - eznzt 6y ago
    I find it hard to understand why that should not be allowed to be said. I know it's in extremely bad taste, but still...
    - NoSorryCannot 6y ago
      You're wondering why making threats of violence against a person or trying to rally a credible threat against them isn't permitted under the first?
      - eznzt 6y ago
        I would have to see the exact text, but the way it was mentioned up in this thread it didn't sound like either of those.
        a_conservative 6y ago
        He didn't call for him to be executed: https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2021/01/02/06/37509512-9105875-image-a-11_1609569839246.jpg https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2021/01/02/06/37509512-9105875-...
        eznzt 6y ago
        Ah, so it's a load of bullshit. As I imagined.
        marz0 6y ago
        What is he proposing then? https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ErGzmjYWMAI_POS?format=jpg&name=large https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ErGzmjYWMAI_POS?format=jpg&name=...
        a_conservative 6y ago
        Thanks for sharing that, I hadn't seen that post. I can see how you would take it that way, but honestly people have been saying a lot worse on the internet for a long time now. I believe he's saying that we should have military tribunals to try and execute traitors, but of course those words were implied, not explicitly said. I agree it's inflammatory for sure, but after all the crap I've seen on the internet, this is hardly a post to justify removing the entire platform this was posted on.
- weaksauce 6y ago
  To extend on that... the entire premise of parler was that everyone was censoring them too much(for similar calls for violence) so they needed a platform that was immune from that. well when your entire premise is flawed from the start it's not a stretch to see that they would be targeted from that like stormfront.
  - waheoo 6y ago
    That's a stretch. Millions feel censored and diminished. You don't get to the level parler got purely because the few extreme users felt censored. You saw a minority of users taking free speech too far. This wasn't Amazon, Google's or Twitter's place to act. This was a job for the police and the FBI and really the fact they intervened at all is just so fucking American. World police that nobody bloody wants.
    - skuthus 6y ago
      Sounds like reasonable open internet regulation, like the type that "The Left" has been fighting to get for decades, would have really been something useful for Republicans to not oppose simply because of its popularity among the left. Instead, we are left with mega corporations being the arbiters of their own platforms, Just like those supporting deregulation wanted.
      - weaksauce 6y ago
        the stuff they were posting on parler was probably illegal[0][1] and parler specifically didn't moderate their violent or seditious rhetoric. (though they did moderate anything that didn't align with their groupthink) 0: https://criminal.findlaw.com/criminal-charges/rioting-and-inciting-riots.html https://criminal.findlaw.com/criminal-charges/rioting-and-in... 1: https://criminal.findlaw.com/criminal-charges/sedition.html https://criminal.findlaw.com/criminal-charges/sedition.html
        snowflake_ptr 6y ago
        > parler specifically didn't moderate their violent or seditious rhetoric Citation needed - this is an extreme claim.
- bosswipe 6y ago
  No, Parler was doing plenty of moderation. They actively suppressed opposing left-wing view points. It was a pure far-right agitation machine.
- humannature1 6y ago
  I had an account there for about six months before it went offline. It wasn't a particularly interesting or compelling website. Most people viewed posts of affiliates; there were some memes but most of it was just conservative talking points. The average post being "this person or movement is a jerk because..." I personally never witnessed any violent discussion on Parler. Again, the website was less compelling than Twitter in all ways; it was more like a news website. I have seen more provocative comments on other forums. I have personally witnessed violent statements on Twitter over several years usually coming from leftists such as AOC. Part of this is due to the comments being easier to read on Twitter than Parler. I assume bad behavior on Parler was deep in the comments, but the website didn't make those easy to read. I thought the Parler takedown seemed random. They were used as a scapegoat. If you were a normal user, you used it to hear a different viewpoint but you still lurked on Twitter some because there was no real discussion happening on Parler.
  - oneeyedpigeon 6y ago
    I'd appreciate it if you could avoid the term "leftist" in future - this may be a cultural thing, but here in the UK, it's almost always used as a derogatory slur. I get the impression that's also true in NA, but forgive me if that isn't the case. Can you provide an example of a violent statement posted on Twitter by AOC?
    - jen20 6y ago
      Not to mention that "leftist" is necessarily relative to some other position. In the UK (not to mention continental Europe!), "left" means something rather different than in the US...
    - humannature1 6y ago
      I won't use leftist again. My anger at censorship is coming out. The proper academic term is postmodernist; at least that's what the Cynical Theories book by Primose mentioned. I told my husband I would stop looking at Twitter since it upsets me so I'm handcuffed to find specific proof there. But, I was primarily referring to the list tweet where AOC mentioned gathering republicans who worked for Trump. There have been other similar sentiments expressed by her to punish people over time; she has an activist side which can get aggressive for a Congresswoman. To be fair AOC isn't the worse I've seen as far as Twitter threats. The worst I've seen is the guy who acted like the controversial professional Mike Adams's suicide was good who is currently a North Carolina professor. Also, there were tweets against Rand Paul which were violent after he got attacked by a neighbor. There have also been tweets for years mostly by random accounts threatening Trump; Gab has organized all the data.
lokar 6y ago
Parlor did not have a real, honest, effort at moderation. It was done poorly, and seems to have been just a fig leaf to say they were doing it. Objectively it was not working. Way way way worse than anything on FB or Twitter.
- jlkuester7 6y ago
  It seems likely that this is true. But couldn't you get to the same end-result by having good intentions but a bad moderation system? (e.g. I want to keep Nazi content off my service so I subject all posts to a review by 5 other users. That might work until you get a bunch of Nazis that suddenly sign up up-vote each other's content). Not every new service can afford to moderate things like "FB or Twitter". And this is an important risk to account for.
  - TeaDrunk 6y ago
    You should be able to identify that a nazi takeover is happening and change your moderation systems accordingly. Any product person who is claiming to own the product should have eagle eyes on how their product is working or not working.
  - jlkuester7 6y ago
    To clarify, I believe that if you don't think you can adequately moderate your service, then you should absolutely not be running it. If your venders do not think you are doing a good enough job moderating your service, then they should not be forced to do business with you. All I am trying to say is that it is important to realize that how you moderate your service may very well be judged by your venders and you could have a bad time if they find it lacking....
    - esja 6y ago
      By that standard Twitter should be in a lot of trouble as well. And probably Facebook too.
  - lokar 6y ago
yks 6y ago
I think things are pretty clear cut, if you want to start a service to obviously harbor fascist user-driven content, then yes, prepare to be cut off from the mainstream vendors. DailyStormer and Parler are explicitly those types of services. It is a bit disingenuous to suggest that because Parler is down, "mom and pop" websites with comment section attached now need to lawyer up.
- jlkuester7 6y ago
  > It is a bit disingenuous to suggest that because Parler is down, "mom and pop" websites with comment section attached now need to lawyer up. This is definitely a straw-man, but at the same time, if your website hosts user-supplied content and you don't have a rock-solid strategy for moderating it, then yeah you probably should be worried. (Though the spammers will probably take down your site long before AWS...)
  - tlholaday 6y ago
    No, the lesson of Parler is not that you need to have > ... a rock-solid strategy for moderating ... The lesson is you need to have a rock-solid `policy` that content which advocates violence is impermissible.
    - jlkuester7 6y ago
      Unfortunately I cannot reference Parlor's actual Community Guidelines (https://legal.parler.com/documents/guidelines.pdf https://legal.parler.com/documents/guidelines.pdf) since the site is down for some reason. :) However, based on what is described here (https://theconversation.com/parler-what-you-need-to-know-about-the-free-speech-twitter-alternative-142268 https://theconversation.com/parler-what-you-need-to-know-abo...) `there are policies against “fighting words” and “threats of harm”. This includes “a threat of or advocating for violation against an individual or group”.` Based on recent examples of Parlor posts it seems like the Parlor moderators were not adequately enforcing this policy.
      - 6y ago
asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
> 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. If you do a sufficiently poor job, you might as well not even be trying at all. Especially if you court the content as a growth strategy. Everyone's free to manage their risks however they please, but I personally have no less confidence in AWS than I had before this event. I have updated my understanding of their decision heuristic as it applies to kicking people off their service. But the probability of me or any company I'd manage running afoul of it is far less than the chance of getting struck by lightning.
yongjik 6y ago
> The bar for getting "canceled" is already moving up ... Eh I'm not so sure about that? I mean, "Did your userbase activately participate in a plot to storm the Capitol and potentially take lawmakers and the VP of the State as hostages (or worse)?" is an awfully high bar to clear.
- burrows 6y ago
  And if my hypothetical platform is decentralized to the extent that I can’t top-down censor content, what then?
  - klmadfejno 6y ago
    That is simply a different question
  - ncallaway 6y ago
    Then you probably shouldn't host it in AWS, because it'll risk violating other AUP terms. The Acceptable Use Policy is here: https://aws.amazon.com/aup/ https://aws.amazon.com/aup/ If your users use your service for illegal or fraudulent activities, you have no way of stopping them, and your service is on AWS, then you risk being shut-down. That hasn't changed today. That was true as of September 16th, 2016 (and probably before then as well)
- bigfudge 6y ago
  Exactly. I already had that factored into my prior for whether my business was going to get cancelled by Amazon. I’d actually expect to fade a court for knowingly facilitating the shit on Parler.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- uberduper 6y ago
  Are we just assuming this userbase doesn't also have twitter, facebook, signal, etc accounts? I recall a lot of live streaming and tweets during the riots.
hinkley 6y ago
The result of doing nothing is that in 15 years, the US becomes Germany, pre-WW2. You can think of it as vendors getting 'canceled' for progressively less severe offenses. Or. You can think of it as people waking up to offenses that have been allowed to go unchallenged for way too fucking long. People 'waking up' or no longer keeping their heads down being the result of the current administration transitioning to a Lame Duck status. The price of Freedom is Eternal Vigilance. Yes, you should absolutely be actively paying attention. No static rule will allow you, or me, or that guy over there to go back to not paying attention.
- mcguire 6y ago
  Clearly, vendors should be made to continue doing business with (some appropriately chosen set of?) clients, because that would be different than post-1933 intrawar Germany...how?
  - hinkley 6y ago
    By 'result of doing nothing' I mean vendors turning a blind eye to their clients, instead of dumping them on the side of the road without even the courtesy of slowing the car down first. I would have thought that was pretty clear from context.
- riversflow 6y ago
  >in 15 years, the U.S. becomes Germany, pre-WW2 >the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. The irony of censoring people being, “the price of freedom”. Serious question, why do you think that disenfranchising groups of their ability to communicate online is going to prevent social strife and violence instead of intensifying it? Banning theDonald didn’t help, the Daily Stormer being banished from the web didn’t change anything, kicking so many reactionaries off of Twitter that they went off to make Gab didn’t help, and destroying Parler and kicking Trump off social media isn’t going to help. How is silencing a group that feels oppressed going to help anything? This, “conservatives are turning into literal nazis” narrative is extremely toxic to public discourse and needs to completely stop.
danans 6y ago
> 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. There is no daylight between the the Daily Stormer and Parler with respect to their willingness to distribute content that promotes far right violence. They also share that same objective as their founding motivation. Just different branding.
- hinkley 6y ago
  As someone who is in theory trying to write software for community-sourced documentation and advice, I've been dragging my heels for years watching things play out on reddit and facebook and twitter and now these buffoons and I just don't know if I'm up to the task. My best defense seems to be trying to keep the niche as small as possible and still be worth my while to do the work, and to be perfectly honest, as 'realistic' as I like to be, saying "keep it small" to myself drains quite a bit of motivation out of me.
  - danans 6y ago
    > "keep it small" to myself drains quite a bit of motivation out of me. Just moderate the platform to remove content that is an incitement to violence or the commission of violent crime. That's a pretty low bar to meet.
    - hinkley 6y ago
      So just read and judge every piece of text entered into the whole platform, 24/7, 365.2425 days a year, both in and out of context.
      - danans 6y ago
        > So just read and judge every piece of text entered into the whole platform No. Not at all. We're software engineers, right? Make the machines do the heavy lifting. Create a simple keyword based alerting mechanism for known inflammatory language in the languages that you support. There are resources to help you make this easier in multiple languages, i.e. https://hatespeechdata.com/ https://hatespeechdata.com/ Add a moderation system for your users to flag abusive content. Until you grow to a huge size, or unless your platform is courting violence promoting content, there should be a relatively small amount of content you need to manually review and remove.
jaredsohn 6y ago
A nit - I think your high/low bar metaphor was backwards. A high bar means that standard is more strict while a low bar means it is less strict.
- jlkuester7 6y ago
  Ha, you are right! Fixed.
mvc 6y ago
Funnily enough I see remarkably few people using the comments on my Strava feed to organize an insurrection.
Applejinx 6y ago
I'm not convinced Parler is meaningfully different from the DailyStormer in this regard. In fact, I would say DailyStormer is plausibly less capable of promoting violence and terrorism than Parler is, and this shows in current events. In terms of effectiveness and threat level, Parler is clearly greater.
jmull 6y ago
> Now Parlor gets "canceled" by vendors for not doing a good enough job trying to moderate content promoting violence. Parler got canceled for something a lot worse than the Daily Stormer.
klmadfejno 6y ago
Doesn't sound like the bar is moving to me from your examples. Not moderating content promoting violence is a decent bar. > any company that is hosting user-driven content needs to have a plan for how to make sure they stay below that bar. Yes... They need to moderate out content that promotes violence. This is a thing that they should do.
wesleywt 6y ago
As the 'bar' goes 'lower' the reason for other vendors to refuse your money becomes less clear. It is quite clear the Parlor is not someone you want on the books.
hchz 6y ago
What's the calculation you need to make? Don't provide an unmoderated online platform for neo-nazis preparing for genocide. I didn't finish my math major but this seems straightforward.
btilly 6y ago
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... I fail to see how this is a movement of the bar. Based on these two examples, the bar seems to be that a site gets canceled if a site is used to promote violence, there is a riot, violence happens, and people return to the site to celebrate and promote future violence. That was the bar in both 2017 and 2021. Doesn't seem to have moved. Given the fact that the attack on the Capitol was a direct attack on the US government, if anything the bar has been RAISED.
adamsea 6y ago
Why are you using quotes around the word “canceled” for the Daily Stormer. It was literally a neo-nazi site. Do you think the issues people had with it were somehow contrived, false, or overblown? Why would you even bring that site up tbh? Lol so far the bar is don’t let people plan a violent insurrection on your app.
- jlkuester7 6y ago
  > Why are you using quotes around the word “canceled” for the Daily Stormer. I was just trying to emphasize that I was using the term in the more loose colloquial sense and not trying to exactly describe the particular actions of the vendors. > Do you think the issues people had with it were somehow contrived, false, or overblown? Wow, seriously I am not sure how you could have managed to get this from my comment. Please do not put words into my mouth. > Why would you even bring that site up tbh? It is a broadly known example of a website that was dropped by pretty much all major online services (including even CloudFlare). What happened to Daily Stormer generated some interesting discussion around online service provides denying services (see the CloudFlare blogpost on why it terminated Daily Stormer: https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/).
CountDrewku 6y ago
Hopefully they keep it up and self sabotage themselves so we don’t even need to break them up.

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.
- eznzt 6y ago
  I find it hard to understand why that should not be allowed to be said. I know it's in extremely bad taste, but still...
  - NoSorryCannot 6y ago
    You're wondering why making threats of violence against a person or trying to rally a credible threat against them isn't permitted under the first?
    - eznzt 6y ago
      I would have to see the exact text, but the way it was mentioned up in this thread it didn't sound like either of those.
      - a_conservative 6y ago
        He didn't call for him to be executed: https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2021/01/02/06/37509512-9105875-image-a-11_1609569839246.jpg https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2021/01/02/06/37509512-9105875-...
        eznzt 6y ago
        Ah, so it's a load of bullshit. As I imagined.
        marz0 6y ago
        What is he proposing then? https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ErGzmjYWMAI_POS?format=jpg&name=large https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ErGzmjYWMAI_POS?format=jpg&name=...
        a_conservative 6y ago
        Thanks for sharing that, I hadn't seen that post. I can see how you would take it that way, but honestly people have been saying a lot worse on the internet for a long time now. I believe he's saying that we should have military tribunals to try and execute traitors, but of course those words were implied, not explicitly said. I agree it's inflammatory for sure, but after all the crap I've seen on the internet, this is hardly a post to justify removing the entire platform this was posted on.
weaksauce 6y ago
To extend on that... the entire premise of parler was that everyone was censoring them too much(for similar calls for violence) so they needed a platform that was immune from that. well when your entire premise is flawed from the start it's not a stretch to see that they would be targeted from that like stormfront.
- waheoo 6y ago
  That's a stretch. Millions feel censored and diminished. You don't get to the level parler got purely because the few extreme users felt censored. You saw a minority of users taking free speech too far. This wasn't Amazon, Google's or Twitter's place to act. This was a job for the police and the FBI and really the fact they intervened at all is just so fucking American. World police that nobody bloody wants.
  - skuthus 6y ago
    Sounds like reasonable open internet regulation, like the type that "The Left" has been fighting to get for decades, would have really been something useful for Republicans to not oppose simply because of its popularity among the left. Instead, we are left with mega corporations being the arbiters of their own platforms, Just like those supporting deregulation wanted.
    - weaksauce 6y ago
      the stuff they were posting on parler was probably illegal[0][1] and parler specifically didn't moderate their violent or seditious rhetoric. (though they did moderate anything that didn't align with their groupthink) 0: https://criminal.findlaw.com/criminal-charges/rioting-and-inciting-riots.html https://criminal.findlaw.com/criminal-charges/rioting-and-in... 1: https://criminal.findlaw.com/criminal-charges/sedition.html https://criminal.findlaw.com/criminal-charges/sedition.html
      - snowflake_ptr 6y ago
        > parler specifically didn't moderate their violent or seditious rhetoric Citation needed - this is an extreme claim.
bosswipe 6y ago
No, Parler was doing plenty of moderation. They actively suppressed opposing left-wing view points. It was a pure far-right agitation machine.
humannature1 6y ago
I had an account there for about six months before it went offline. It wasn't a particularly interesting or compelling website. Most people viewed posts of affiliates; there were some memes but most of it was just conservative talking points. The average post being "this person or movement is a jerk because..." I personally never witnessed any violent discussion on Parler. Again, the website was less compelling than Twitter in all ways; it was more like a news website. I have seen more provocative comments on other forums. I have personally witnessed violent statements on Twitter over several years usually coming from leftists such as AOC. Part of this is due to the comments being easier to read on Twitter than Parler. I assume bad behavior on Parler was deep in the comments, but the website didn't make those easy to read. I thought the Parler takedown seemed random. They were used as a scapegoat. If you were a normal user, you used it to hear a different viewpoint but you still lurked on Twitter some because there was no real discussion happening on Parler.
- oneeyedpigeon 6y ago
  I'd appreciate it if you could avoid the term "leftist" in future - this may be a cultural thing, but here in the UK, it's almost always used as a derogatory slur. I get the impression that's also true in NA, but forgive me if that isn't the case. Can you provide an example of a violent statement posted on Twitter by AOC?
  - jen20 6y ago
    Not to mention that "leftist" is necessarily relative to some other position. In the UK (not to mention continental Europe!), "left" means something rather different than in the US...
  - humannature1 6y ago
    I won't use leftist again. My anger at censorship is coming out. The proper academic term is postmodernist; at least that's what the Cynical Theories book by Primose mentioned. I told my husband I would stop looking at Twitter since it upsets me so I'm handcuffed to find specific proof there. But, I was primarily referring to the list tweet where AOC mentioned gathering republicans who worked for Trump. There have been other similar sentiments expressed by her to punish people over time; she has an activist side which can get aggressive for a Congresswoman. To be fair AOC isn't the worse I've seen as far as Twitter threats. The worst I've seen is the guy who acted like the controversial professional Mike Adams's suicide was good who is currently a North Carolina professor. Also, there were tweets against Rand Paul which were violent after he got attacked by a neighbor. There have also been tweets for years mostly by random accounts threatening Trump; Gab has organized all the data.

lokar 6y ago

Parlor did not have a real, honest, effort at moderation. It was done poorly, and seems to have been just a fig leaf to say they were doing it. Objectively it was not working. Way way way worse than anything on FB or Twitter.

jlkuester7 6y ago
It seems likely that this is true. But couldn't you get to the same end-result by having good intentions but a bad moderation system? (e.g. I want to keep Nazi content off my service so I subject all posts to a review by 5 other users. That might work until you get a bunch of Nazis that suddenly sign up up-vote each other's content). Not every new service can afford to moderate things like "FB or Twitter". And this is an important risk to account for.
- TeaDrunk 6y ago
  You should be able to identify that a nazi takeover is happening and change your moderation systems accordingly. Any product person who is claiming to own the product should have eagle eyes on how their product is working or not working.
- jlkuester7 6y ago
  To clarify, I believe that if you don't think you can adequately moderate your service, then you should absolutely not be running it. If your venders do not think you are doing a good enough job moderating your service, then they should not be forced to do business with you. All I am trying to say is that it is important to realize that how you moderate your service may very well be judged by your venders and you could have a bad time if they find it lacking....
  - esja 6y ago
    By that standard Twitter should be in a lot of trouble as well. And probably Facebook too.
- lokar 6y ago

yks 6y ago

I think things are pretty clear cut, if you want to start a service to obviously harbor fascist user-driven content, then yes, prepare to be cut off from the mainstream vendors. DailyStormer and Parler are explicitly those types of services. It is a bit disingenuous to suggest that because Parler is down, "mom and pop" websites with comment section attached now need to lawyer up.

jlkuester7 6y ago
> It is a bit disingenuous to suggest that because Parler is down, "mom and pop" websites with comment section attached now need to lawyer up. This is definitely a straw-man, but at the same time, if your website hosts user-supplied content and you don't have a rock-solid strategy for moderating it, then yeah you probably should be worried. (Though the spammers will probably take down your site long before AWS...)
- tlholaday 6y ago
  No, the lesson of Parler is not that you need to have > ... a rock-solid strategy for moderating ... The lesson is you need to have a rock-solid `policy` that content which advocates violence is impermissible.
  - jlkuester7 6y ago
    Unfortunately I cannot reference Parlor's actual Community Guidelines (https://legal.parler.com/documents/guidelines.pdf https://legal.parler.com/documents/guidelines.pdf) since the site is down for some reason. :) However, based on what is described here (https://theconversation.com/parler-what-you-need-to-know-about-the-free-speech-twitter-alternative-142268 https://theconversation.com/parler-what-you-need-to-know-abo...) `there are policies against “fighting words” and “threats of harm”. This includes “a threat of or advocating for violation against an individual or group”.` Based on recent examples of Parlor posts it seems like the Parlor moderators were not adequately enforcing this policy.
    - 6y ago

asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago

> 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. If you do a sufficiently poor job, you might as well not even be trying at all. Especially if you court the content as a growth strategy. Everyone's free to manage their risks however they please, but I personally have no less confidence in AWS than I had before this event. I have updated my understanding of their decision heuristic as it applies to kicking people off their service. But the probability of me or any company I'd manage running afoul of it is far less than the chance of getting struck by lightning.

yongjik 6y ago

> The bar for getting "canceled" is already moving up ... Eh I'm not so sure about that? I mean, "Did your userbase activately participate in a plot to storm the Capitol and potentially take lawmakers and the VP of the State as hostages (or worse)?" is an awfully high bar to clear.

burrows 6y ago
And if my hypothetical platform is decentralized to the extent that I can’t top-down censor content, what then?
- klmadfejno 6y ago
  That is simply a different question
- ncallaway 6y ago
  Then you probably shouldn't host it in AWS, because it'll risk violating other AUP terms. The Acceptable Use Policy is here: https://aws.amazon.com/aup/ https://aws.amazon.com/aup/ If your users use your service for illegal or fraudulent activities, you have no way of stopping them, and your service is on AWS, then you risk being shut-down. That hasn't changed today. That was true as of September 16th, 2016 (and probably before then as well)
bigfudge 6y ago
Exactly. I already had that factored into my prior for whether my business was going to get cancelled by Amazon. I’d actually expect to fade a court for knowingly facilitating the shit on Parler.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
uberduper 6y ago
Are we just assuming this userbase doesn't also have twitter, facebook, signal, etc accounts? I recall a lot of live streaming and tweets during the riots.

hinkley 6y ago

The result of doing nothing is that in 15 years, the US becomes Germany, pre-WW2. You can think of it as vendors getting 'canceled' for progressively less severe offenses. Or. You can think of it as people waking up to offenses that have been allowed to go unchallenged for way too fucking long. People 'waking up' or no longer keeping their heads down being the result of the current administration transitioning to a Lame Duck status. The price of Freedom is Eternal Vigilance. Yes, you should absolutely be actively paying attention. No static rule will allow you, or me, or that guy over there to go back to not paying attention.

mcguire 6y ago
Clearly, vendors should be made to continue doing business with (some appropriately chosen set of?) clients, because that would be different than post-1933 intrawar Germany...how?
- hinkley 6y ago
  By 'result of doing nothing' I mean vendors turning a blind eye to their clients, instead of dumping them on the side of the road without even the courtesy of slowing the car down first. I would have thought that was pretty clear from context.
riversflow 6y ago
>in 15 years, the U.S. becomes Germany, pre-WW2 >the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. The irony of censoring people being, “the price of freedom”. Serious question, why do you think that disenfranchising groups of their ability to communicate online is going to prevent social strife and violence instead of intensifying it? Banning theDonald didn’t help, the Daily Stormer being banished from the web didn’t change anything, kicking so many reactionaries off of Twitter that they went off to make Gab didn’t help, and destroying Parler and kicking Trump off social media isn’t going to help. How is silencing a group that feels oppressed going to help anything? This, “conservatives are turning into literal nazis” narrative is extremely toxic to public discourse and needs to completely stop.

danans 6y ago

> 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. There is no daylight between the the Daily Stormer and Parler with respect to their willingness to distribute content that promotes far right violence. They also share that same objective as their founding motivation. Just different branding.

hinkley 6y ago
As someone who is in theory trying to write software for community-sourced documentation and advice, I've been dragging my heels for years watching things play out on reddit and facebook and twitter and now these buffoons and I just don't know if I'm up to the task. My best defense seems to be trying to keep the niche as small as possible and still be worth my while to do the work, and to be perfectly honest, as 'realistic' as I like to be, saying "keep it small" to myself drains quite a bit of motivation out of me.
- danans 6y ago
  > "keep it small" to myself drains quite a bit of motivation out of me. Just moderate the platform to remove content that is an incitement to violence or the commission of violent crime. That's a pretty low bar to meet.
  - hinkley 6y ago
    So just read and judge every piece of text entered into the whole platform, 24/7, 365.2425 days a year, both in and out of context.
    - danans 6y ago
      > So just read and judge every piece of text entered into the whole platform No. Not at all. We're software engineers, right? Make the machines do the heavy lifting. Create a simple keyword based alerting mechanism for known inflammatory language in the languages that you support. There are resources to help you make this easier in multiple languages, i.e. https://hatespeechdata.com/ https://hatespeechdata.com/ Add a moderation system for your users to flag abusive content. Until you grow to a huge size, or unless your platform is courting violence promoting content, there should be a relatively small amount of content you need to manually review and remove.

jaredsohn 6y ago

A nit - I think your high/low bar metaphor was backwards. A high bar means that standard is more strict while a low bar means it is less strict.

jlkuester7 6y ago
Ha, you are right! Fixed.

mvc 6y ago

Funnily enough I see remarkably few people using the comments on my Strava feed to organize an insurrection.

Applejinx 6y ago

I'm not convinced Parler is meaningfully different from the DailyStormer in this regard. In fact, I would say DailyStormer is plausibly less capable of promoting violence and terrorism than Parler is, and this shows in current events. In terms of effectiveness and threat level, Parler is clearly greater.

jmull 6y ago

> Now Parlor gets "canceled" by vendors for not doing a good enough job trying to moderate content promoting violence. Parler got canceled for something a lot worse than the Daily Stormer.

klmadfejno 6y ago

Doesn't sound like the bar is moving to me from your examples. Not moderating content promoting violence is a decent bar. > any company that is hosting user-driven content needs to have a plan for how to make sure they stay below that bar. Yes... They need to moderate out content that promotes violence. This is a thing that they should do.

wesleywt 6y ago

As the 'bar' goes 'lower' the reason for other vendors to refuse your money becomes less clear. It is quite clear the Parlor is not someone you want on the books.

hchz 6y ago

What's the calculation you need to make? Don't provide an unmoderated online platform for neo-nazis preparing for genocide. I didn't finish my math major but this seems straightforward.

btilly 6y ago

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... I fail to see how this is a movement of the bar. Based on these two examples, the bar seems to be that a site gets canceled if a site is used to promote violence, there is a riot, violence happens, and people return to the site to celebrate and promote future violence. That was the bar in both 2017 and 2021. Doesn't seem to have moved. Given the fact that the attack on the Capitol was a direct attack on the US government, if anything the bar has been RAISED.

adamsea 6y ago

Why are you using quotes around the word “canceled” for the Daily Stormer. It was literally a neo-nazi site. Do you think the issues people had with it were somehow contrived, false, or overblown? Why would you even bring that site up tbh? Lol so far the bar is don’t let people plan a violent insurrection on your app.

jlkuester7 6y ago
> Why are you using quotes around the word “canceled” for the Daily Stormer. I was just trying to emphasize that I was using the term in the more loose colloquial sense and not trying to exactly describe the particular actions of the vendors. > Do you think the issues people had with it were somehow contrived, false, or overblown? Wow, seriously I am not sure how you could have managed to get this from my comment. Please do not put words into my mouth. > Why would you even bring that site up tbh? It is a broadly known example of a website that was dropped by pretty much all major online services (including even CloudFlare). What happened to Daily Stormer generated some interesting discussion around online service provides denying services (see the CloudFlare blogpost on why it terminated Daily Stormer: https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/).

CountDrewku 6y ago

Hopefully they keep it up and self sabotage themselves so we don’t even need to break them up.