4 ms·

"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 w

"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)
- sn_master 6y ago
  Everyone nowadays is one-sided it seems. Its very sad..
  - nix23 6y ago
    It's the perfect setup going extreme to one or the other side, and peoples are happy because they think it's the right way to go....truly sad.
    - sn_master 6y ago
      I got flagged when my post was literally only this one line: "Are MAGA-shouting or the anti-Obama rumors illegal? How about the countless anti-Trump rumors, including the ones involving his children?" Either both are illegal or neither is. If anything, the many of the anti-Trump rumors have reached a point that the anti-Obama have never had. I remember back when the Internet was the place to be open minded and avoid the real world biased or ill-informed discussions. Now its the total opposite.
flatline 6y ago
If a service provider detects illegal activity taking place on their services, I assume the correct action is to contact the relevant authorities and suspend the activity until it gets straightened out. Which seems to be what has happened here. I don't know exactly what efforts were made to work with Parler in advance but I do believe there have been some, and Parler has refused to take action on their own behalf.
Johnny555 6y ago
So if someone posts a plot to kill lawmakers, take over the government all while using their website to organize the insurrection, you're saying that they can't be held to ToS terms banning illegal content until a court has ruled on whether or not their insurrection is illegal? I haven't seen the examples that AWS provided to Parler, but I trust that AWS lawyers signed off on the plan so they show a lack of moderation on Parler's part.
- sn_master 6y ago
  When there was a plot against the Michigan governor, without a single step of the plot going into action everyone was arrested and convicted and no one from either party complained about that, after being shown the evidence. If Parler or someone on Parler is doing something wrong, arrest and convict them using the law. AWS lawyers can sign-off anything because the Terms and Conditions are skewed entirely in AWS favor, let alone the new king in town.
  - Johnny555 6y ago
    If Parler or someone on Parler is doing something wrong, arrest and convict them using the law. So you're in favor of removing moderation entirely and hosting providers given broad immunity from liability for any type of content -- feel free to plot your murder, host child porn, plan an insurrection, whatever; and it should be up to the government to track down the responsible parties.... even if those parties are untraceable or not even in the USA? AWS lawyers can sign-off anything because the Terms and Conditions are skewed entirely in AWS favor, let alone the new king in town. So you don't dispute that Parler violated the ToS, you're disputing the ToS themselves and that they unfairly target companies like Parler?
    - sn_master 6y ago
      AWS is within their legal rights. This thread is about the ethics of what they did and this is clear. I didn't say anything about removing moderation. In fact I talked about reporting the offending posts and making sure the website owner took action within a timely fashion, action which includes reporting the details to the authorities. Parler was one of the few sites that required a photo ID verification to make posts, precisely for that kind of reason. If they wanted to turn a blind eye, they would have kept it anonymous.
pixl97 6y ago
I'm calling total crap on that. At best this is civil law and contract interpretation between the two parties. Or, should AWS be forced to host the Daily Stormer against their own freedom of association?
- sn_master 6y ago
  I was addressing OP who said the content was illegal. AWS is within their legal rights to boot anyone off because of the Terms and Conditions. This thread is about the ethical side of what they did.
- nomdep 6y ago
  Yes. AWS is so big that the common carrier laws should apply to it.
  - pixl97 6y ago
    Then argue that law in front of congress. Even still, the first amendment doesn't cover calls to action so even this would have been well within legal rights to block or terminate.
    - Closi 6y ago
      Ah yes, the old “someone can’t have an opinion on what should happen unless they themselves draft legislation and take it into congress.”
sbilstein 6y ago
Parler was essentially 90% MAGA shouting. There was virtually no content that was non-political and it was basically the Twitter version of the anti-Obama rumor emails my boomer dad kept forward me from 2008-2016. I had the app, checked it quite a bit while trying to understand the other side better.
- sn_master 6y ago
  Are MAGA-shouting or the anti-Obama rumors illegal? How about the countless anti-Trump rumors, including the ones involving his children?
  - sbilstein 6y ago
    ...I was just answering the question around what the content was like on Parler.
    - sn_master 6y ago
      The answer is inviting for discussion tho..
  - sildur 6y ago
    MAGA people are at best fascists, at worst terrorists. If it's not illegal it should be.
    - sn_master 6y ago
      Trump got seventy two million votes a couple months ago. Are they all fascists too, or just the "MAGA subset"? How big is that subset you think?
vladTheInhaler 6y ago
And it is being decided. This is how that looks. Parler has sued Amazon, and Amazon will presumably respond. Expecting Amazon to sue Parler to show that it has the right to drop it just isn't realistic. IANAL, but I can't imagine how Amazon could show that it had standing in that situation.
wan23 6y ago
Everyone is responsible for knowing if their actions are legal or not. If you shoot someone on the street and use the defense that you thought it was legal because a court didn't tell you that it wasn't in advance, then you're going to have a bad time.
- Closi 6y ago
  There is no evidence I have seen that Parler was doing anything illegal. Note that my understanding is that hosting someone else’s illegal speech is not in itself illegal (if it was, the buzzfeed article would also need to be taken down).
nonbirithm 6y ago
There is already a precedent from decades ago. The U.S. and pretty much every developed country on Earth have laws against distributing and possessing child pornography, because child pornography creates a market for exploiting children and selling the recordings online. The universal consensus is that this kind of expression needs to be restricted in the strictest possible terms, because it causes material harm to disadvantaged people. Nobody loud enough to be picked up in the media bats an eye at this reasoning for sanitizing the open Internet of such content, and online the words "illegal content" have become more or less synonymous with child pornography. Researchers looking into the subject to study its actual effects have been ostracized themselves because it's so hated. Its illegality has entered the realm of common sense at this point. So maybe there exists some extreme in terms of what you can post online such that if you disagree and insist that a certain class of content needs a platform because of reasons relating to "free speech," you will be almost universally disagreed with and vehemently ostracized. That's why the deplatforming doesn't surprise me much. But determining what counts as inciting violence is harder to determine. You can't post images of children that were actually exploited and later declare with plausible deniability that the content of those images were not to be taken seriously, because they act as photographic evidence of a crime. But how many people that post online about hanging a politician would really act on those words if the politician was within arm's reach? It's another question as to whether or not child pornography incites child exploitation, instead of just incentivizing it, similar to the argument that pornography incites rape. But it seems to be agreed on that humanity would be better off without it entirely, to the point of very harsh legislation. I'm wondering if this is the direction some people would want to take the spreading of misinformation and alleged incitement. I wonder how many people who distribute child pornography would change their outlook on it in the face of evidence.
- sn_master 6y ago
  Child abuse websites all get seized and their owners arrested by a court order. The websites don't just get "blocked". Parler was not, and in all likelihood, cannot be convicted, because they were only sharing speech. The SCOTUS even ruled that anti-gay-marriage was considered free and protected speech because a good percent of the population has different opinion than the rest. Same for pro-Trump material. He had seventy two million votes just a couple of months ago. That's not the same as child abuse which is universally condemned by the entire population.

nix23 6y ago

I don't know who downvotes you, but it has to be a really blind, one sided person(-s)

sn_master 6y ago
Everyone nowadays is one-sided it seems. Its very sad..
- nix23 6y ago
  It's the perfect setup going extreme to one or the other side, and peoples are happy because they think it's the right way to go....truly sad.
  - sn_master 6y ago
    I got flagged when my post was literally only this one line: "Are MAGA-shouting or the anti-Obama rumors illegal? How about the countless anti-Trump rumors, including the ones involving his children?" Either both are illegal or neither is. If anything, the many of the anti-Trump rumors have reached a point that the anti-Obama have never had. I remember back when the Internet was the place to be open minded and avoid the real world biased or ill-informed discussions. Now its the total opposite.

flatline 6y ago

If a service provider detects illegal activity taking place on their services, I assume the correct action is to contact the relevant authorities and suspend the activity until it gets straightened out. Which seems to be what has happened here. I don't know exactly what efforts were made to work with Parler in advance but I do believe there have been some, and Parler has refused to take action on their own behalf.

Johnny555 6y ago

So if someone posts a plot to kill lawmakers, take over the government all while using their website to organize the insurrection, you're saying that they can't be held to ToS terms banning illegal content until a court has ruled on whether or not their insurrection is illegal? I haven't seen the examples that AWS provided to Parler, but I trust that AWS lawyers signed off on the plan so they show a lack of moderation on Parler's part.

sn_master 6y ago
When there was a plot against the Michigan governor, without a single step of the plot going into action everyone was arrested and convicted and no one from either party complained about that, after being shown the evidence. If Parler or someone on Parler is doing something wrong, arrest and convict them using the law. AWS lawyers can sign-off anything because the Terms and Conditions are skewed entirely in AWS favor, let alone the new king in town.
- Johnny555 6y ago
  If Parler or someone on Parler is doing something wrong, arrest and convict them using the law. So you're in favor of removing moderation entirely and hosting providers given broad immunity from liability for any type of content -- feel free to plot your murder, host child porn, plan an insurrection, whatever; and it should be up to the government to track down the responsible parties.... even if those parties are untraceable or not even in the USA? AWS lawyers can sign-off anything because the Terms and Conditions are skewed entirely in AWS favor, let alone the new king in town. So you don't dispute that Parler violated the ToS, you're disputing the ToS themselves and that they unfairly target companies like Parler?
  - sn_master 6y ago
    AWS is within their legal rights. This thread is about the ethics of what they did and this is clear. I didn't say anything about removing moderation. In fact I talked about reporting the offending posts and making sure the website owner took action within a timely fashion, action which includes reporting the details to the authorities. Parler was one of the few sites that required a photo ID verification to make posts, precisely for that kind of reason. If they wanted to turn a blind eye, they would have kept it anonymous.

pixl97 6y ago

I'm calling total crap on that. At best this is civil law and contract interpretation between the two parties. Or, should AWS be forced to host the Daily Stormer against their own freedom of association?

sn_master 6y ago
I was addressing OP who said the content was illegal. AWS is within their legal rights to boot anyone off because of the Terms and Conditions. This thread is about the ethical side of what they did.
nomdep 6y ago
Yes. AWS is so big that the common carrier laws should apply to it.
- pixl97 6y ago
  Then argue that law in front of congress. Even still, the first amendment doesn't cover calls to action so even this would have been well within legal rights to block or terminate.
  - Closi 6y ago
    Ah yes, the old “someone can’t have an opinion on what should happen unless they themselves draft legislation and take it into congress.”

sbilstein 6y ago

Parler was essentially 90% MAGA shouting. There was virtually no content that was non-political and it was basically the Twitter version of the anti-Obama rumor emails my boomer dad kept forward me from 2008-2016. I had the app, checked it quite a bit while trying to understand the other side better.

sn_master 6y ago
Are MAGA-shouting or the anti-Obama rumors illegal? How about the countless anti-Trump rumors, including the ones involving his children?
- sbilstein 6y ago
  ...I was just answering the question around what the content was like on Parler.
  - sn_master 6y ago
    The answer is inviting for discussion tho..
- sildur 6y ago
  MAGA people are at best fascists, at worst terrorists. If it's not illegal it should be.
  - sn_master 6y ago
    Trump got seventy two million votes a couple months ago. Are they all fascists too, or just the "MAGA subset"? How big is that subset you think?

vladTheInhaler 6y ago

And it is being decided. This is how that looks. Parler has sued Amazon, and Amazon will presumably respond. Expecting Amazon to sue Parler to show that it has the right to drop it just isn't realistic. IANAL, but I can't imagine how Amazon could show that it had standing in that situation.

wan23 6y ago

Everyone is responsible for knowing if their actions are legal or not. If you shoot someone on the street and use the defense that you thought it was legal because a court didn't tell you that it wasn't in advance, then you're going to have a bad time.

Closi 6y ago
There is no evidence I have seen that Parler was doing anything illegal. Note that my understanding is that hosting someone else’s illegal speech is not in itself illegal (if it was, the buzzfeed article would also need to be taken down).

nonbirithm 6y ago

There is already a precedent from decades ago. The U.S. and pretty much every developed country on Earth have laws against distributing and possessing child pornography, because child pornography creates a market for exploiting children and selling the recordings online. The universal consensus is that this kind of expression needs to be restricted in the strictest possible terms, because it causes material harm to disadvantaged people. Nobody loud enough to be picked up in the media bats an eye at this reasoning for sanitizing the open Internet of such content, and online the words "illegal content" have become more or less synonymous with child pornography. Researchers looking into the subject to study its actual effects have been ostracized themselves because it's so hated. Its illegality has entered the realm of common sense at this point. So maybe there exists some extreme in terms of what you can post online such that if you disagree and insist that a certain class of content needs a platform because of reasons relating to "free speech," you will be almost universally disagreed with and vehemently ostracized. That's why the deplatforming doesn't surprise me much. But determining what counts as inciting violence is harder to determine. You can't post images of children that were actually exploited and later declare with plausible deniability that the content of those images were not to be taken seriously, because they act as photographic evidence of a crime. But how many people that post online about hanging a politician would really act on those words if the politician was within arm's reach? It's another question as to whether or not child pornography incites child exploitation, instead of just incentivizing it, similar to the argument that pornography incites rape. But it seems to be agreed on that humanity would be better off without it entirely, to the point of very harsh legislation. I'm wondering if this is the direction some people would want to take the spreading of misinformation and alleged incitement. I wonder how many people who distribute child pornography would change their outlook on it in the face of evidence.

sn_master 6y ago
Child abuse websites all get seized and their owners arrested by a court order. The websites don't just get "blocked". Parler was not, and in all likelihood, cannot be convicted, because they were only sharing speech. The SCOTUS even ruled that anti-gay-marriage was considered free and protected speech because a good percent of the population has different opinion than the rest. Same for pro-Trump material. He had seventy two million votes just a couple of months ago. That's not the same as child abuse which is universally condemned by the entire population.