77 ms·

How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler

• theandrewbailey 6y ago
  > And in part it is because the Democrats are about to control the Executive Branch and both houses of Congress, leaving Silicon Valley giants eager to please them by silencing their adversaries. The Biden Administration is getting stuffed with corporate executives and lobbyists of all kinds. If that alleged quote about fascism being the merger of corporate and state power, then congratulations, fascists! You won. And if that quote is wrong, this situation is still bad, way worse than Trump.
  • whateveracct 6y ago
    Trump was a kleptocrat.
• chrispeel 6y ago
  I detest click-bait
• ainiriand 6y ago
  To be honest, I am glad they did. I am sick and tired of these people finding that there are loopholes in which they can hide their hate speech and fascist rhetoric.
  • mcfly1985 6y ago
    Fuck you fascist.
    • dang 6y ago
      We've banned this account for breaking the site guidelines. You can't post like this or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25022331 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25022331, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  • baxtr 6y ago
    I can understand why you might feel that way. At the same time, I think censorship on an infrastructure level sets a very strong precedent. I think infrastructure players should refrain completely from that kind of action.
    • PretzelFisch 6y ago
      At the end of the day if my buisness is hosting something the market does not like, my buisness will suffer. It becomes harder to retain and attract new customers and grow my buisness and interfers with my marketing messaging. We live in a capitalistic society this is how the free market works.
    • anthonyrstevens 6y ago
      AWS and Twitter are not infrastructure. Electricity and telecoms are infrastructure.
    • mind-blight 6y ago
      I just don't think AWS should be considered core infrastructure. ISPs are definitely core infra, which is why I think net neutrality is so important. Domain name registrars and CC processors are a bit of a grey area for me, since those gate access to the internet and online financial services respectively, but there's plenty of precedent for blocking certain businesses from both of those services. AWS is great the servers you run. Those can be anywhere on earth, including physically located at your business
    • titzer 6y ago
      I think we disagree on what censorship means. To me, censorship very clearly means an active effort to go out and eliminate a particular type of speech or a particular speaker. That means going out and finding that speech or speaker and shutting them down, everywhere. In this instance, a platform decides, effectively "we refuse to host your ideas, go elsewhere." Facebook and Google and Twitter aren't going out of their way to scrub these people off the internet; they are just kicking them off their own platform. You might consider this part of the "cancel culture", but it's not censorship.
    • 6y ago
  • diegoholiveira 6y ago
    This power could be used to sensor you in the future. This power could be put in the hands of a group of people who thinks completely different from you.
    • whatisthiseven 6y ago
      That power has always existed, and could have always been used "by those who think completely different" from us. If they think that differently, then they wouldn't even think twice about using said power to censor. In this case, Twitter et al. thought a LOT about what to do, as they did very little for 4 year's of Trump's presidency, and only decided to act after Trump incited a literal self-coup and insurrection with the goal of illegitimately keeping himself in power. If in the future "those who think completely differently from me" are going to think liberal ideas are so dangerous to be removed, it won't matter what "standard" we set today. It seems even with the highest standard of "don't support open coups", you still think I will be judged the exact same. Censorship is bad. But insurrections against legitimate governments are worse.
      • diegoholiveira 6y ago
        I do agree 100% with you. That's why I do think we need to decrease the power of the state and also the power of the corporations using a modern antitrust law. If they power continues to grow, we'll live in a totalitarian state, dictate by politicians and corporations together.
    • filleduchaos 6y ago
      Honestly, where on earth have you people been? Tech companies have been "censoring" all sorts of people they deem undesirable for years, why is it the literal terrorist white supremacists that caused everyone to sit up and notice?
• howlgarnish 6y ago
  How do HN readers, who I presume would generally support safe harbor provisions for free speech, common carrier rules etc, not find it deeply alarming that this is happening? Even if Parler hosted straight up illegal content, surely the proportional response is to block those accounts, not the entire platform? If no, why aren't we deplatforming Twitter or Facebook next?
  • akmarinov 6y ago
    This right here. At least Apple gave them time to implement moderation in their app. A really unrealistic 24 hour timeframe, but still. Truth is it was good PR to obliterate Parler for everyone involved and they weren't a big enough player to be able to fight back.
  • awillen 6y ago
    Blocking individual accounts is something Parler can do (and chose not to), not Amazon/Facebook/Google who don't have access to the contents of those accounts (at least not easily). Also, it's worth looking at some of the hacked info that was released - Parler had a serious moderation system, but it was used to make sure people had MAGA viewpoints, not to prevent violence. This is not some free and open platform, it was a controlled one that purposely built an echo chamber of violent rhetoric. Twitter and Facebook don't allow the same kind of violent rhetoric, lies, etc., and while they may not do an ideal (or even good) job at it, the fact is they're broad platforms used for a whole lot of things for a whole lot of people and are absolutely not comparable to Parler.
    • Allower 6y ago
      >Twitter and Facebook don't allow the same kind of violent rhetoric, lies, etc. You must not be paying much attention..this is simply not true
    • 6sup6 6y ago
      I can remember very well calls for violence in twitter against Nick Sandemann. And I remember very well those calls for violence not being removed at all. Also, during the riots of 2020, it was extremely common to find calls to violence in twitter that weren't deleted.
• darig 6y ago
  Parler, in a show of embarrassing lack of technical ability, unable to build and operate their own private infrastructure, destroyed themselves.
• patagonia 6y ago
  A monopoly is composed of “one” entity. It’s in the name. This is not a fair characterization of what happened.
  • cassianoleal 6y ago
    You are technically correct. The right term in this case is an oligopoly. Semantically it makes little difference though.
    • darig 6y ago
      It certainly is different when EVERYONE hates you, rather than just the king.
    • patagonia 6y ago
      Which generally requires collusion. There was no collusion. These are independent actors in a competitive space that arrived at the same conclusion independently. People want free speech. You get free speech so long as your speech doesn’t unduly impinge on other’s liberties. That is the trade off we accept when we exchange the rule of force for the rule of law in a self governing, democratic society. People are not complaining about business practices. People are complaining about not being able to say whatever they want over whatever medium they want even if other people get dead.
      • 6sup6 6y ago
        Mark zuckerberg, during one of the senate hearings, admitted that facebook coordinates with other big tech companies in certain situations.
        • patagonia 6y ago
          In this situation?
  • FabHK 6y ago
    I suppose that the article is talking about monopolies in their respective market (namely iOS app stores, Android app store, and "the cloud"). Unless you're quite tech savvy, you can't sign up for Parler anymore by using a competitor. So, while I mostly disagree with Greenwald, I don't think this characterisation is unfair.
• igetspam 6y ago
  Multiple companies banding together is not a monopoly. This was a collective effort. You could call it a polyoploy but click-bait gonna click-bait. They didn't kill Parker though, we did. We made if clear that we wouldn't do business with companies that supported the worst of us. They complied with our demands to force them out of the public sphere and I applaud them for it. As an ex Googler and generally anti FAANG, I don't have many fond words for them but I support this action. For the most part, I even approve of the timeline: let garbage peddling monsters be garbage peddling monsters until they do real damage and then cut them off.
• lachlanwaterbur 6y ago
  Well, that's the last HN article I will knowingly read.
• yoav 6y ago
  Ya why would AWS have any reason to stop providing service to a customer who didn’t follow their terms of service and took pride in a festering a community of terrorists who are now making credible threats to attack aws and recently tried to overthrow the US government in a violent coup. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25745908 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25745908 The mental gymnastics of the people defending Parler on here are wild. If Parler was a community of ISIS or any non-white non-christian extremists none of y’all would be insisting on Apple or Amazon’s requirement to do business with them and be complicit.
  • brodouevencode 6y ago
    Completely not true. ISIS, Hamas, and other Wahhabistic groups still maintain a very large presence on these platforms. A little closer to home, riots and looting were planned in real time on Twitter. It's admittedly a very hard problem to solve.
    • awillen 6y ago
      How about some examples of ISIS using AWS?
      • amadeuspagel 6y ago
        ISIS uses AWS in the same sense the capitol hill rioters did, via services like twitter that are hosted on AWS.[1] [1]: https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/RR1300/RR1328/RAND_RR1328.pdf https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/...
        • dboreham 6y ago
          == they don't use AWS.
          • hnburnsy 6y ago
            I do not know if Twitter uses AWS now but it looks like they will be, I believe that Parler mentioned it in the lawsuit it filed. 'Amazon.com Inc.'s AMZN, Amazon Web Services announced Tuesday that Twitter Inc. would be using its cloud services to support its delivery of users' timeliness.' https://www.marketwatch.com/story/aws-says-twitter-will-use-its-cloud-services-to-help-scale-its-timeline-2020-12-15 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/aws-says-twitter-will-use-...
• snikeris 6y ago
  Why is this flagged?
  • bjornsing 6y ago
    I have no idea... but I’d sure like to know.
  • brodouevencode 6y ago
    It's such a polarizing topic that anyone with a slightly opposing viewpoint will immediately recoil in disgust, for the most part.
  • mattbee 6y ago
    Probably the rep of Greenwald, a notably "former journalist". (it's unflagged right now)
• helen___keller 6y ago
  > With virtual unanimity, leading U.S. liberals celebrated this use of Silicon Valley monopoly power to shut down Parler Just to be clear, it's possible to detest silicon valley monopoly power while celebrating the deplatforming of Parler in particular. Antitrust is one concern, the risk of losing democracy to political violence during a transition of power is a separate concern.
• mindvirus 6y ago
  I still don't know what to think about this. On one hand, Parler was a hate site, filled with conspiracy theories, radicalization and racism. So it's no loss that it's gone, and it took far too long to deal with it. And just like I wouldn't bat an eye for AWS taking down an ISIS recruitment site, I don't really see any loss here. On the other hand, do we really want a handful of unelected billionaires deciding what is acceptable speech - whether or not we agree with them? We talk about net neutrality, but shouldn't we apply the same standard to hosts like AWS? Overall it feels like a legislative failure - in an ideal world, we have laws applied even handedly to deal with this. But in the absence of political will for these laws, what should be done? I think we are better off without Parler, but how can we do that in an even handed and consistent way?
  • MrMan 6y ago
    Parler is not gone, I don't think,
    • dude_bro 6y ago
      I would agree - what's interesting to me is that taking Parler off the mainstream platforms like Google and Apple app stores though will probably only contribute to the radicalization of its content. Essentially, these companies are probably just contributing to the thing they are against. But I guess so long as their hands aren't getting dirty they get to pretend like they're doing the right thing and taking the moral high ground.
  • awillen 6y ago
    They're not deciding what is acceptable speech. They're deciding what is acceptable speech for their platforms and services. And given how absolutely insane and extreme that speech became before they took action, it's just strange to look at these companies like they're a problem. They tolerated increasingly violent and hateful rhetoric until people literally stormed the Capitol, then took action against the worst offender that helped to plan violence against our elected officials. This isn't some theoretical case of billionaires imposing their worldviews by banning people that we should be tremendously fearful of.
• MrMan 6y ago
  anti trust action is needed against a few big tech firms, but this article for some reason frightens me. I dont understand the perspective and there seem to be contradictory undercurrents. I dont use any social network apps except occasionally browsing my couple of dozen friends feeds on my private Instagram account. I know Insta is not good, but I dont feel particularly threatened by it, since no discussion is ocurring (on my feed), just pictures and videos of music and places people have been, meals they have cooked. I don't really care if Amazon crushes Parler. I also don't find back-doors, infiltration and R&D relationships with the government alarming or surprising. What matters to me is whether the government itself is corrupt. I am a globalist and I do hope for more, not less integration between trade blocs. I think it would be beneficial to avoid the supply chain panic that underlies the extreme pursuit of labor cost arbitrage, but not in pursuit of national, but rather regional, balance of power and trade. Surveillance is not going away. We cannot fight it. What can be combated is the willingness to harm others and the tendency to view others as separate from ourselves and as a danger to our interests. But these tech firms are not yet absolute monopolies - Amazon, Google, Facebook, all display in my opinion anti-competitive and in some cases anti-consumer behaviour, but I think a new framework is needed to quantify harm in tech antitrust regulation. I think Facebook is the most egregious offender because, as I have hyperbolically stated before, have constructed what amounds to a genocide machine. So while they are not "anti-consumer" in terms of price, they are anti-peace and stability of the system which hurts all of us. They disrupt the political process and not in a fun way. Greenwald seems to be inviting pretty draconian anti-trust action, which would certainly be a bit controversial because some libertarians might not like it - ideologically the founders of Parler might be among them. On the other hand he seems to be stroking Parler as being some kind of underdog that is less bad somehow than other social networks. In my view Parler is only different in scale. Again, Greenwald makes me very uneasy in this article because he comes out hard against "monopoly" but whose side is he on? I feel weird that I agree on paper that antitrust action is needed, but his article feels bought and paid for in some way.
• FabHK 6y ago
  While I generally disagree with Greenwald, he makes a good point here: > So why did Democratic politicians and journalists focus on Parler rather than Facebook and YouTube? Why did Amazon, Google and Apple make a flamboyant showing of removing Parler from the internet while leaving much larger platforms with far more extremism and advocacy of violence flowing on a daily basis?
  • MrMan 6y ago
    "while leaving much larger platforms with far more extremism and advocacy of violence flowing on a daily basis" I am not sure this is true? The point could have been made without resort to hyperbole stretching into disingenuousness. What about that other platform should not be the issue - social network apps/sites are all subject to and propagate abuse.
  • ppeetteerr 6y ago
    Democratic politicians have been hounding Facebook and YouTube since 2016. Perhaps you mean why did we focus so much of our efforts on a single website? In this very moment, it's because this website was used to coordinate the efforts of a national group of potential terrorists. The pot boiled hard and fast.
    • pas 6y ago
      Charlottesville was a proving ground. Trump's singing to white nationalists, violence against "the other side", casualti(es). In this particular case Trump directly ordered the attack. (At first I put quotes on order and attack, but alas no quotes needed, it's what it is.) But he has been flaring these flames since ... that fucking birth certificate dog whistle.
      • ppeetteerr 6y ago
        It's surprising Twitter let him keep his account this long. SV is not _that_ powerful.
    • ashtonkem 6y ago
• ppeetteerr 6y ago
  "Yet American liberals swoon for this authoritarianism" you had me up to this point. Liberals don't swoon for this any more than they do for a mandatory curfew to curb coronavirus cases. The powers of SV are a lot and I would hope that out of the ashes of the last four years we get a) a more progressive Conservative party and b) a more diversified collection of service providers, to combat AWS, and the like. All of these companies, for what it's worth, seems to only use their power when its socially acceptable. For instance, they continue to abide by restrictive Chinese laws for the benefit of money. I'm convinced they will submit to the will of the state in Poland as well, where freedom of speech appears to mean something entirely different.
• MrMan 6y ago
  this shouldnt be flagged - I think it is a bad blog post by Greenwald, but it is good fodder for discussion
• kevwil 6y ago
  This is the beginning of the end for America. Regardless of whether we agree or disagree with what someone says, a free society depends on freedom of expression. It's the first right in the Bill of Rights for a good reason. Layers and layers of legal loopholes make politically biased corporate censorship perfectly legal. I weep for those whose livelihood depends on social media and e-commerce, because they now must live in fear of having their lives destroyed for expressing an opinion. Or for no reason at all.
  • MrMan 6y ago
    boohoo - if I have to be afraid of half the country putting me on a kill list because of what they read on social media, then people who peddle poison via social media - including the social media firms themselves - should be as uncomfortable as me and my family.
    • alboy 6y ago
      To me, the worldview where half the population of the country are mindless zombies that can be remotely controlled through their social media feed and need to be shepherded by Uncle Faang just to prevent them from killing people is even bleaker than GP's perspective.
  • eastbayjake 6y ago
    This is a really bad take. This country has never accepted calls for violent overthrow of our democratic system as "freedom of expression", and that's a view that's been upheld by all three branches of government across all eras of our history from the founding (Shays Rebellion?) through the Civil War (which definitively settled that armed rebellion is not a permissible way to settle political differences) through World War I (which defined our current laws about sedition and restrictions on the freedoms in the First Amendment) to the present day. You don't have a right to force anyone else -- individuals or private corporations -- to amplify your views, and you certainly don't have a right to incite violence or rebellion even on your own dime. EDIT: This would be a less bad take if Parler had been booted just because people on the platform voted for Trump, but to be clear: Parler was booted because it was used to organize an armed rebellion with the explicit goal of finding and executing members of Congress certifying a democratic vote, and its users have been encouraging people to feed Democrats' families into woodchippers while making them watch.
• mattbee 6y ago
  How this cesspool got built is a metaphor for the wingnuts who used it. Most of us here know - if you want a resilient, censorship-free service, you can still: buy your own physical servers, rent data centre space (or a garage), buy multiple transit pipes to ensure traffic can get to them from a variety of places. You can move your servers around if you have to and keep your sovereignty despite everything else changing. It's how the internet was designed! Amazon, Google, Apple and most other private companies can go whistle if they want you offline. Sure it takes expertise, time, expense, negotiation... but that's the price of true freedom, internet patriots! Instead they built everything on top of the conveniences and goodwill of a single US company, with no backup plan. Hardly living in the wild west - and that's this mob down to a tee. Rich, well-connected dorks who desperately need the society they organise to tear down - why be surprised when the society hits back in such a tiny way as terminating their AWS account? If this is censorship, I'm a bowl of noodle soup.
  • ppeetteerr 6y ago
    Reminds me of all the libertarians who flocked to Bitcoin because it was considered a way to circumvent the government, and then realized that a) you need governments to run the pipes, b) much of the mining is done by conglomerates and c) the unregulated market is about as stable as a ship at sea
    • seanyesmunt 6y ago
      This is being worked on https://www.coindesk.com/gotenna-bitcoin-wallet-mesh-network https://www.coindesk.com/gotenna-bitcoin-wallet-mesh-network
  • mattbee 6y ago
    Downvotes? raises fist to sky This is censorshiiiiip!!1!
  • fasdf1122 6y ago
    just admit it, you're a closet racist.
  • 6y ago
• jimmy2020 6y ago
  Why this post is flagged? HN, If you don't like the post, please ignore it don't enforce censorship with flagging.
  • jimmy2020 6y ago
    Wow, just keep getting downvoted because I think we should be allowed to criticize and discuss big tech decisions on the biggest community for tech. Thanks!
• DeafSquid 6y ago
  They can run their site on their own servers. Nobody should be forced to host content they don't agree with.
• maxehmookau 6y ago
  I simply don't care. Sure, there's slippery slope arguments and discussions to be had about who gets to decide what is and isn't acceptable speech. Right now though there's a small group of people looking to cause harm and damage using tools that barely existed 10 years ago and our laws won't keep up. Antisemitism and racism have no place in the world and private companies have no business profiting from its proliferation. Silicon Valley wants to use its power to make it harder for people with those views to meet, organize and share their views? Crack on. I will use my limited resources and time on this planet to cry for someone else.
  • pstuart 6y ago
    While I loath "think of the children!" arguments, I'll lower myself to one here. Imagine that Parler was a site dedicated to child pornography. Would anybody be complaining about it being shut down them? Hopefully not. My point is that what Parler represented was equally odious. It's a hate speech platform and hate speech should not be tolerated.
    • Closi 6y ago
      Well hosting and distributing child pornography is illegal, while hosting other people’s hate speech isn’t. And how is hosting hate speech “equally odious” to hosting photos of abused children anyway?! You can use the same argument to abolish all free speech, just by claiming that anything your opponent says is equal to abusing children.
      • Clubber 6y ago
        He's using hyperbole to make the argument an emotional one rather than using reason. I'm not sure if he even knows he's doing it or not, the tactic of hyperbole has become so prevalent in today's political discussions.
        • pstuart 6y ago
          We're on the precipice of a civil war that's being fanned by this hate speech. I wish it were hyperbole.
• yalogin 6y ago
  No one sheds a tear for Parlor, but lets also be clear about this, the social media companies just showed a token of conscience and it doesn't mean anything. They still didn't boot people like Cruz, Hawley and Gaetz and the numerous others still inciting the insurrection. I am sure they will not boot these lawmakers as they will face retaliation if they do. I don't trust the change of heart they are showing.
  • koolba 6y ago
    > No one sheds a tear for Parlor, but lets also be clear about this, the social media companies just showed a token of conscience and it doesn't mean anything. They still didn't boot people like Cruz, Hawley and Gaetz and the numerous others still inciting the insurrection. If following a constitutional process for protesting a State's results in a presidential election is "inciting the insurrection", somebody better start fitting Nancy Pelosi for an orange jumpsuit: https://www.c-span.org/video/?185005-2/debate-ohio-electoral-vote-objection https://www.c-span.org/video/?185005-2/debate-ohio-electoral...
    • yalogin 6y ago
      Didn’t realize people on HN rationalize sedition and insurrection too.
      • koolba 6y ago
        > Didn’t realize people on HN rationalize sedition and insurrection too. It's not sedition or insurrection to wait your turn and speak out in Congress that the results for a State are invalid. That's exactly what the Constitution stipulates you should do. It wasn't a crime or an insurrection when Pelosi did it and it's not a crime now. If you want a word to describe then versus now I'd go with hypocrisy. On the wider topic, it's sad that people's biases have become so blatant against others with different political views that they interpret every comment in the most disingenuous light, with the dumbest of assumptions. One does not have to call out "Violence is bad!" in every comment or statement that they make for it to be true. It should be assumed as that's the default for any sane individual in modern society. So, yes violence is bad. We all know that. But unless you can show me where Cruz or Hawley actually committed acts of violence or directly instructed people to do the same, talk of them being guilty of insurrection is totally out of line. If telling your supporters to "March to the capital and make your voices heard!" is an insurrection we're not going to have room in our prisons.
• deeeeplearning 6y ago
  Lots of "Libertarians" with bad hyprocrisy in constantly bringing up "free speech." Yet the same people cheer for Christian Bakeries that refuse to serve gay couples. And those people trying to claim these tech companies are "utilities" are insane. There is a 0% chance that any tech company is going to be declared a utility in the next several decades in the US and to think otherwise is totally absurd. So those arguments just hold no water.
• wavesounds 6y ago
  It's called a boycott. It's not a "monopolistic force" when they're many different companies ranging from lawyers and accountants to cloud providers and app stores. Boycott: "withdraw from commercial or social relations with (a country, organization, or person) as a punishment or protest."
• remote_phone 6y ago
  I do think that what they did is setting themselves up for regulation. To shut off a service used by millions overnight is dangerous.
  • busterarm 6y ago
    Regulation by whom? They just sent the biggest signal they possibly could that they're willing to play ball to keep one party in full control of our government forever. Big Tech is part of your government now. As if years of senior cabinet positions for Big Tech employees wasn't already enough of a clue.
• ashtonkem 6y ago
  Glenn Greenwald again proving to be a crank. If Silicon Valley is such an overwhelming monopolistic force, why is 8kun and 4chan up? No, Parler did a dumb thing by depending so deeply on one hosting provider, and the inevitable bit them.
• Kapura 6y ago
  This is what happens if you build a platform on somebody else's platform: you're subject to their whims. Any and all people who make their living off of YouTube understands this, and they intentionally diversify so they have options if their primary platform becomes unavailable. Outside of that, though, I couldn't care less that fascist organization platforms are being tanked. Free speech as an abstract principle has been used as cover for fascism in the U.S. for the better part of the past half century.
  • commandlinefan 6y ago
    > somebody else's platform My concern is how far down "somebody else's platform" goes. Twitter bans Trump: they're a platform, they can ban whoever they want. AWS bans Parler: they're a platform, they can ban whoever they want. Verizon is an ISP... are they a platform? Can they ban whoever they want? GoDaddy is a domain registrar. Are they a platform? Can they ban whoever they want?
    • root_axis 6y ago
      > Verizon is an ISP... are they a platform? Remember net neutrality? Guess who killed it.
    • dgellow 6y ago
      Also to consider/add to your list: certificates authorities.
    • Kapura 6y ago
      Yes, this is the different between utilities and other forms of business. If you think everybody is entitled to cloud compute resources, then your argument holds water.
  • sershe 6y ago
    A few years ago, the power was cut to the broadcasting studio of Navalny's organization (a Russian opposition guy), while they were live covering the anti-corruption protests. I guess "this is what happens if you build a platform on somebody else's platform", instead of running your own power plant!
• codenesium 6y ago
  I feel like you have the right to free speech. You don't have a right to a platform though. If you want to spread your hate person to person go for it. We're not going to broadcast your nonsense to the world.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
• vannevar 6y ago
  Or, "How Parler outsourced nearly every critical aspect of its business, incurring massive risk in pursuit of maximizing profits." This is the risk of the modern, ultra-lean online enterprise. Parler got kicked off for knowingly providing a communications platform for terrorists. But other businesses that ride along on the backs of FAANG, like the business equivalent of remora eels, have been similarly affected by factors out of their control like changing search algorithms and shifting app store policies. It's a risk of running a business on top of someone else's business.
• Bud 6y ago
  "Monopolistic force"? Fucking Glenn Greenwald. Jesus. This is neither "monopolistic", nor is it "force". Words still have meaning. First, obviously it's not monopolistic; quite obviously, Parler is still entirely free to roll its own hosting, even if every host out there shuns them. Second, for reasons I hope I don't have to explain, this isn't "force". This is the opposite of force. This is peaceably retreating from doing business with Parler. I don't know what happened to Glenn Greenwald about 10 years ago, but something definitely happened.
  • enraged_camel 6y ago
    Glenn is totally fine with fascists, as long as those fascists aren't after him personally (i.e. Bolsonaro).
  • busterarm 6y ago
    You're perfectly free to drill your own oil, even if nobody in the oil industry will supply you. At a certain point this kind of argument is farcical. If you can't at a minimum get racks in a datacenter, the bandwidth and power costs of running a site that large will destroy you. Oh and DNS registrars are known for being picky about their customers too.
    • Bud 6y ago
      Fine, but even if we accept all that, Glenn's argument that this is "monopolistic" doesn't pass the laugh test. Because in order for Parler to be unable to get racks in any datacenter, it'd be necessary for dozens or hundreds of different providers to all refuse access. That doesn't sound like a "monopoly" to anyone who has a dictionary or understands what "mono" means. If the bandwidth and power costs destroy them? Then maybe they just don't have the resources to run their giant multi-million-user Nazi site, and they should go out of business, like all businesses that lack the resources to sustain operations.
      • dragonwriter 6y ago
        > Fine, but even if we accept all that, Glenn's argument that this is "monopolistic" doesn't pass the laugh test. Well, at least that it's an SV monopoly. If the reason that so many businesses are cutting service and not just to Parler is that, in the wake of the Capitol attacks corporate counsel have taken note of the law on knowing material support to terrorists, which includes supplying essentially any service when you know of it's use in connection with a wide array of federal criminal offenses that are designated as “terrorism”, then there is a monopoly denying them service, and it’s the monopoly on legitimate force held by the US government.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• deeeeplearning 6y ago
  The US is being destroyed by the Paradox of Tolerance and Putin/Xi could not be happier. What better possible outcome, short of an actual Civil War, could there be to prove to their people that Democracy is a flawed ideology?
• SpaceL10n 6y ago
  This is just a good ole' fashioned reactionary claw back. It's not a show of force. I feel bad for Parler, they got the short end of the stick. But can't have your cake and eat it too.
• Synaesthesia 6y ago
  The left has been censored and deleted enough times from social media and regular media, that this is a cause for concern. Any laws which restruc freedom of speech could come back to haunt us.
• bluedays 6y ago
  I use to have an immense respect for Glen Greenwald and follow his writing regularly, but Greenwald's tone has changed drastically recently. I'm not sure why, but he seems to have a rather myopic view of the left. It's a sudden departure from the writing he was known for during the days of The Intercept and Salon.com. I am honestly even starting to question the honesty of his writing, even. An example for this article: > including a refusal to aggregate user data in order to monetize them to advertisers or algorithmically evaluate their interests in order to promote content or products to them. He says this but fails to mention that the same people who were the founders of Cambridge Analytica also were the founder of Parler https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20201116/01141545710/what-if-cambridge-analytica-owned-own-social-network-ca-backer-rebekah-mercer-admits-shes-co-founder-parler.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20201116/01141545710/what-... Furthermore there seems to be little, if any, mention of the fact that the Mercers who were major funders for the Trump organization were also using the data obtained from Cambridge Analytica to target political advertising. https://www.npr.org/2018/03/20/595338116/what-did-cambridge-analytica-do-during-the-2016-election https://www.npr.org/2018/03/20/595338116/what-did-cambridge-... I know this is beyond the scope of the article that Greenwald was writing but having read his writing for years I have to wonder why it wasn't mentioned? It's not something that would typical go without mention in writing from earlier in his career. I am not one to typically hedge on the side of removing "free speech" from people, but Parler represented a clear and present threat to American democracy. The ties to the Trump organization and it's funders were innumerable. Why does Greenwald have an agenda to foment discord regarding this? His writing lately, the twitter screeds that he has gone on against the left, and his staunch denial of the Russian interference in the 2016 election makes me question if he hasn't been compromised in some way.
• robodale 6y ago
  Good. I have no tolerance for the "Gravy Seals" planning attacks using platforms like Parler.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• LatteLazy 6y ago
  America (and my own country the UK) really need to have a serious reckoning with a whole mess of things: Fake news, Populism, weak leadership, short termism, lack of compromise and partisanship, the rise of extremism, censorship and cancel-culture, demographics vs democracy issues, racism, over-zealous anti-racism, and win-at-all-cost politicians to name but a few. But it isn't ready or willing to even start. Until then, it's hard to really care about any of this. I don't like censorship or big companies deciding what's acceptable. But someone has to, and no one else is willing to oppose some of the worst people and events we've had in generations.
• NDizzle 6y ago
  Can anyone provide a link to all of these reprehensible things that Parler refused to take down? I know this may be difficult to do currently, with the site brought offline, but still.
  • NDizzle 6y ago
    I'm searching, but I'm finding things like this: https://www.politico.com/news/2020/11/22/parler-maga-election-echo-chamber-439056 https://www.politico.com/news/2020/11/22/parler-maga-electio... "Hashtags on Parler denoting Trump’s favorite conspiracy theories — #Dominion, #Sharpiegate, #QAnon — trend freely, without the restrictions Twitter and Facebook have instituted to suppress them." Hashtags trend freely. Oh no! I might be exposed to free range hashtags! I may have to actually think for myself.
  • jonathankoren 6y ago
    It's not so much the "refused to take down" anything, the community was doing exactly what site intended. The problem is that community started planning violence. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jemimamcevoy/2021/01/07/capitol-attack-was-planned-openly-online-for-weeks-police-still-werent-ready/?sh=21d3c73876e2 https://www.forbes.com/sites/jemimamcevoy/2021/01/07/capitol...
    • NDizzle 6y ago
      Greenwald says the majority of the planning was done on Facebook. https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1348619731734028293.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1348619731734028293.html
      • jonathankoren 6y ago
        1) So what? You can have a bit planning, as a treat? 2) Facebook is self hosted.
        • NDizzle 6y ago
          The "so what" is that Parler was taken down for an action that was planned on Facebook.
• maedla 6y ago
  Is it good that unelected people have this much power? No. Did they do the right thing here? Yes
• RIMR 6y ago
  Leave it to Glenn Greenwald to, in the face of violence, sedition, and misinformation, care more about some vacuous notion of "free speech" than the health of our Democracy. This guy used to have a ton of my respect, but honestly he seems like a complete joke recently.
  • dominicjj 6y ago
    You don't live in a democracy by design. You live in a constitutional republic.
    • dredmorbius 6y ago
      Pedantic hairsplitting is pedantic.
      • dominicjj 6y ago
        Not hairsplitting at all. They're vastly different systems. And you know they are.
• exegete 6y ago
  People complain that this violates free speech rights but what about the rights of those at AWS, Twitter, etc? They have the right not to do business or associate with these people.
• bun_at_work 6y ago
  > In August, 2018, they created a social media platform similar to Twitter but which promised far greater privacy protections, including a refusal to aggregate user data in order to monetize them to advertisers or algorithmically evaluate their interests in order to promote content or products to them. Sure, Parler isn't going to serve you a custom feed with that data, but what are they doing with it? They collect an insane amount of PII to create an account, when compared with alternatives Reddit and Twitter. On another note, this whole article is written in bad faith: - The AppStore screen shot shows Parler at the top of the social media list on Jan 8th, when it was trending because the impending ban, but the image is intended to show Parler as a more popular app. Bad Faith. - The claim that there was a united attack is unsubstantiated, and, in order with Occam's Razor, it is far more believable that these companies banned their support of Parler as a response to violations of ToS from those companies than any sort of conspiracy. - In referencing the Congressional report on anti-competitive practices, the article seeks to conflate the actions taken against Parler with anti-competitive behavior. This doesn't come close to being anti-competitive. ToS were violated, and private companies have to right to not host whatever they want, and the right to moderate it however they want. - The article seeks to conflate the actions of some mega corporations with _all_ liberals, claiming all liberals cheered for this. That is also unsubstantiated mudslinging. - The article overall seeks to conflate freedom of speech with access to private platforms and mass audiences. This is not the reality. Parler itself may have promoted itself as a free-speech platform, but that was only true if you agreed with the common opinion on the platform, and anyone who promoted dissenting ideas there were banned. The whole article is a bad-faith farce, and should be treated as such. Ignore it. There are real points to be made about how the behavior of these companies might impact discourse, whether they have too much power, and more. However, this bad faith argument is a distraction from meaningful discourse.
  • squibbles 6y ago
    >The whole article is a bad-faith farce, and should be treated as such. Ignore it. > >There are real points to be made about how the behavior of these companies might impact discourse, whether they have too much power, and more. However, this bad faith argument is a distraction from meaningful discourse. I disagree that the article distracts from meaningful discourse. To the contrary, the article has elicited a great deal of meaningful discourse (in these HN threads) that helps us examine the role of social media in modern society.
• igammarays 6y ago
  Whack-a-mole. Users will move to decentralized platforms or other providers in no time. In the past 72 hours alone, more than 25 million new users from around the world joined Telegram, an app built by Russians.
  • RIMR 6y ago
    This may be true, but this is a lousy excuse for tolerating Nazis on your platform. Sure, banning a Nazi from Twitter doesn't actually kill the Nazi. They still exist, they still have Internet access, and they're still filled with hate. But at least they're not on Twitter anymore. And when AWS sees that they're flocking to a hate site hosted on their platform, there's no reason they have to tolerate it. Sure, they'll go somewhere else, and maybe the hate site will find a new hosting provider, but at least they aren't hosted on AWS anymore. If we have to play an constant game of Whack-a-Nazi, I vote we whack as many Nazis as we can.
    • 6sup6 6y ago
      Will you also include communists in your game? I'm asking this because many countries had "beautiful experiences" while being governed by communists.
    • cccc4all 6y ago
      In your worldview, how many people are Nazis? Is it thousands, Millions, Billions? What will you do when you find out that a family member or friend or neighbor is a "Nazi"?
• CivBase 6y ago
  I've seen a lot of people say Parler was intentionally designed to host morally objectionable content and that they refused to moderate it. Many arguments supporting the de-platforming of Parler hinge on those assertions. I have not seen any evidence backing up those claims, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. If you're aware of any such evidence, could you please post it? I'd honestly just like to understand the situation better. In the absence of such evidence, I see two plausible explanations: 1.) Parler was a small-scale operation (30 employees from what I've heard) who built a social media platform intended to appeal to pro-Trump conservatives by tolerating a higher degree of free speech compared to the likes of established social media platforms. It became very popular very quickly and speech on the platform became increasingly violent. Parler's relatively small team was unable to keep up with moderating so much content, which enabled a lot of extremist calls for violence to propagate. Since they could not keep up with AWS's requests to moderate their platform and it was facing public scrutiy after events at the capitol, AWS pulled the plug. 2.) Parler was intended as a platform for violent, pro-Trump extremists and used "free speech" as a week justification to not moderate their platform. It became very popular very quickly and speech on the platform became increasingly violent. Parler still refused to moderate the platform even after events at the capitol, so AWS pulled the plug. AWS is not necessarily in the wrong in either case. However, the optics for Parler looks very different between the scenarios.
  • amanaplanacanal 6y ago
    I thought the owner said he didn’t want to moderate, not that he was unable to.
    • CivBase 6y ago
      Did he? That may be true, but I've heard conflicting stories, which is why I'm asking for evidence one way or the other.
• justinzollars 6y ago
  I for one excited about the decentralized tools that will be developed and adopted as a result of Silicon Valley's censorship.
• est 6y ago
  might as well add sendgrid, digitalocean, twilio, etc to that list.
• romellem 6y ago
  There is a lot of misinformation in this thread. Read the letter [AWS sent them][1]. This isn't AWS punishing a corporation for having different political views, this is AWS not taking on the risk that their infra contributes to violent acts. [1]: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/johnpaczkowski/amazon-parler-aws https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/johnpaczkowski/amazon-p...
  • hnburnsy 6y ago
    I read it and Amazon said they found 98 posts across serval weeks that were related to violence and the included screen shots showed very little engagement with those posts. I read that Parler had 2.3 million DAU in December. Feels like weak sauce from Amazon, but I do get their objection to the CEOs moderation comment.
    • monocasa 6y ago
      They gave 98 examples, and Parlor refused to moderate those examples even when they were specifically pointed out by Amazon. It's not that they could only find those examples. And among those examples were specific calls to bomb AWS data centers.
      • hnburnsy 6y ago
        Parler said in its lawsuit they did address everything Amazon raised. My point was the small number against the large user base. BTW, that bomb post had 0,0,0 which I assume is retweeets, up votes, and down votes. Amazon looked over several weeks and that was the best they could find?
        • monocasa 6y ago
          It's not that Amazon was able to find these comments, it's that they had looked for examples, given those examples to Parler, and even that low barrier for moderation wasn't reached after a normal amount of time. As in 'here's specific examples of what you agree clearly need moderation, and are calling for terrorist attacks on our (Amazon)'s infratstructure, you (Parler) still haven't taken down days later'. > It’s our view that this nascent plan to use volunteers to promptly identify and remove dangerous content will not work in light of the rapidly growing number of violent posts. This is further demonstrated by the fact that you still have not taken down much of the content that we’ve sent you. They sent the examples well before they sent the final letter, gave Parler plenty of time, and Parler refused to even moderate under those extremely generous circumstances.
• ChrisLomont 6y ago
  Also: how Silicon Valley makes companies like Parler possible.
• jmartrican 6y ago
  Maybe I'm wrong but this isnt about politics, its about violence to the public. Only when that line was crossed did private companies concluded their terms of service were breached.
  • txsoftwaredev 6y ago
    Only when it was clear the Republican party would hold little power in the US government did private companies concluded their terms of service were breached.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• cafard 6y ago
  "Freedom of the press belongs primarily to him who owns one." --A.J. Liebling, quoted from memory.
• owlbynight 6y ago
  Our political representatives are corrupt and generally represent whomever gives them the most money, namely large corporations. We, the people, are represented through our wallets now by the corporations that control our politicians because social media has unionized us. We're able to use online platforms to leverage companies into giving us what we want socially by threatening them when they step out of line. The companies that led to Parler shutting down were acting on public sentiment as a boon to their brands, thus ultimately reflecting the will of the people. It's kind of like a single payer system for social justice. It's weird end run back to representation but I'll take it for now. The radical right is a scourge that, unchecked, will lead to us having no rights at all. They need to be repeatedly smacked down until normalcy is achieved.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• chasing 6y ago
  There's an interesting debate to be had about all of this, but this Glenn Greenwald article ain't it.
• piercebot 6y ago
  Silicon Valley does not control the Internet though. I get that headlines like this make for good clickbait, but it's not like Parler can no longer exist on the Internet. Parler can go buy some servers, hook them up to the internet, and come back online.
• tjr225 6y ago
  What a backwards ass situation we've found ourselves in. Imagine the flip side. Imagine if a bunch of "conservatives" from Mississippi started a web hosting company 10 years ago and then an anti-fascist social media platform sprouted up on their infrastructure. Imagine people on this platform started posting about how black lives matter on the platform. Imagine what the "conservative" reaction would be. You take a platform for violent extremists off of _private_ servers hosted by a _private_ company on the West Coast and everyone flips their lid. "Conservatives" have no shame.
• thesausageking 6y ago
  Parler isn't destroyed. They're in the process of migrating to Epik and will be back online. Epik is also who hosts Gab, InfoWars, and other similar right wing sites. They signed a contract with AWS and didn't live up to it, so AWS cancelled it. That's how free markets work.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
• locusofself 6y ago
  Is Substack becoming the Parler of journalism in a way? It seems to be attracting "overton window" challengers from both sides, but I wonder if it's going to devolve into a cesspool in it's own way.
  • acdha 6y ago
    It’s a common failure mode of funding everything from advertising: controversy attracts attention and you can ratchet that up profitably for a long time before you reach a point where advertisers don’t want to be associated with you.
• curation 6y ago
  Platforms are a form of the public commons that have been privatized. The privatization is the problem, not the content. What is happening is that the form of free public speech has become, over the past 15 years, something that we now have to pay rent to use. FB, Microsoft, Google, Twitter, Parler are private forms of communication that we now all have to pay rent to in order to communicate. There needs to be a free public commons of communication. If that existed this problem would not exist. It is, as most here have asserted, a dissonance and problem with allowing unelected billionaires to decide on free speech. This is because it attacks the form of free public speech only because of the content and our economic order. The solution is to create an international public commons that protects communication, health, etc.
• fblp 6y ago
  The author uses the word "united" liberally, implying there was some kind of collusion between Amazon, Apple and Google. I would imagine it was quite the opposite, they each would have independently banned/limited Parler regardless of what the other company did. Parler also doesn't compete with any of those companies. It competes with Facebook and Twitter. So where's the anti-competitive conduct?
  • saagarjha 6y ago
    Generally services look at each other when deciding to ban things.
    • MattGaiser 6y ago
      The guy with no shirt and no shoes does not have an anti trust lawsuit because McDonalds, Burger King, and Wendy's all decided to prohibit his entry into their restaurants. Sometimes the customer is the reason they all make the same decision.
      • bravo22 6y ago
        That's if it is equally applied to everyone. Examples, similar to yours, are used as basis of racial discrimination lawsuits when the evidence shows that it is selectively applied to a group of people.
        • kickopotomus 6y ago
          Discrimination is perfectly legal in the US. It is only illegal if you discriminate against someone within a protected class on the basis of them being a member of that protected class. Political affiliation is not a protected class.
          • JarlUlvi 6y ago
            political affiliation/activity is definitely protected in certain US states. "California. In California, employers may not control the political affiliation or activities of workers. Employers cannot threaten to terminate workers for refusing to engage in specific political activity. Colorado. In Colorado, an employer may not prevent employees from engaging in political activities. An employer may not terminate an individual because of political affiliation. District of Columbia. In the District of Columbia, employers cannot discriminate against employees based on political affiliation. Louisiana. Louisiana law prohibits employers from threatening or intimidating individuals on account of political party affiliation. Minnesota. Minnesota law prevents employers from financially retaliating against, or threatening to fire, an individual based on that individual’s political activities. Montana. Under Montana law, an employee may only be terminated for “good cause.” That is, the termination must be based on reasonable grounds related to work performance. Termination based on political activity is prohibited. Termination based on political affiliation is prohibited. Nebraska. Employers may not threaten to terminate individuals based on their political activities. New Jersey. New Jersey law prohibits employers from requiring employees to take part in employer-sponsored meetings about the employer’s political opinions or positions. New York. Employers cannot discriminate against employees based on their off-duty, off-premises political activities. South Carolina. Employers may not terminate a citizen from employment because of that person’s political opinions or activities. Wisconsin. Wisconsin law also prohibits employers from threatening to terminate employees based on political activity." Above provided from Legalmatch
• guyzero 6y ago
  Shunning is a perfectly valid means of social expression.
• eplanit 6y ago
  These actions and events are making the case solid that the Internet is a utility, and needs to be regulated as such. It's sad, but inevitable.
• chmod600 6y ago
  Would Twitter/FB have lived up to these standards early on? It seems like any new social platform could be pretty easily crushed under these standards. So the only way we will see a new social media platform is if they build their own data centers, and can grow without having an app. And maybe they need their own browser, maybe client hardware like phones and tablets? It seems unlikely that a startup would succeed under these conditions. So we better be happy with our current overlords (and whatever humans happen to be in charge of those companies in the future).
• esoterica 6y ago
  Parler has already has another host, which is proof that Amazon etc. don't have monopolistic force.
• andred14 6y ago
  I was on Parler and never did I see anyone suggest violence This ban is simply the spread of commun1st party propaganda. советский комиссар приветствует вас товарищ. Да здравствует Сталин!!
• yandrypozo 6y ago
  Finally someone gets it: "No authoritarians believe they are authoritarians."
• aeturnum 6y ago
  The stupidest possible take on things always seems to rise to the top of social media. First, I fully agree that the entire mobile ecosystem is walled-garden first. That should be addressed to a greater degree than sideloading apps on android. Second, the idea that this is 'monopolistic' seems deeply silly. Parler isn't offline because Amazon, the only provider of web services, told them to get off the internet. It's offline because Amazon and most of their specialized service providers (twilio, etc) kicked them off as well as all of those service providers' competitors. This is not an example of monopolistic power. It's an example of an entire industry choosing to reject a company they find odious. This is very similar to what happened with Stormfront some years ago[1]. Still, this is troubling. I feel like it's reasonable to see Parler as acting in bad faith. It seems to me like they knowingly fostered an environment that would lead to militants using the service to plan attacks. I think they protest too much. I also think that hosting truly "free" speech in an ethical way is enormously, obviously difficult. Threats are genuinely hard to evaluate and must be taken seriously. Mass communication has been at the center of all the modern genocides (and early forms of communication were key to the older ones). I think this is the discussion we should be having - what is the "right" way to create a space where people are save to speak? How could Parler have existed to allow people to speak their minds while preventing the platform from providing aid to violent hate groups? I suspect it's impossible to allow people to speak freely about their belief that other people are not human without fomenting violence but it's clear that not everyone agrees with that and I think we need to talk about it. P.s. Quite sad to see that Greenwald has descended into red-faced sputtering grievance-listing. I agree that the moral case for shutting down Parler and shutting down Facebook is the same. I think both should be shut down for fomenting and planning violence. We can reopen both of them when we figure out how to more effectively stop their use in violence. I didn't even need ten paragraphs to say it. [1] https://slate.com/technology/2017/08/stormfront-has-been-kicked-offline.html https://slate.com/technology/2017/08/stormfront-has-been-kic...
• seventytwo 6y ago
  There’s absolutely nothing “monopolistic” about any of this. Greenwald is a conspiratorial loon.
• matt-attack 6y ago
  Curious if you feel torn supporting the US highway infrastructure? It can clearly be used for to traffic drugs, humans, blackmarket weapons, etc. It can be used to flee justice, evade police, abets vehicular manslaughter, etc. The list goes on and on. Is it even controversial to support the highway system as is? Do we loose sleep over it? I feel like we've all been a bit brainwashed by the government in our notion that "free speech" must have limits. I very much doubt that that is true. I think the speech part should always be 100% free. Of course any crimes that derive from it are and will always been fully enforceable. I just question whether or not the speech itself should be viewed as illegal, or something that should be regulated. Obviously all of the insidious planning and hatred that presumably occurred on Parler is abhorrent. I think I can hate all of those things without believing that the site should be censored.
  • newacct583 6y ago
    > I feel like we've all been a bit brainwashed by the government in our notion that "free speech" must have limits. I very much doubt that that is true. Then why are you posting that on a heavily-moderated discussion forum and not 8kun?
    • uncoder0 6y ago
      Well funny you mention 8kun specifically it is down at the time of your comment. I find HN to be a good balance of moderation and open discussion. Like all platforms it has it's biases but, people are relatively civil and open to discussion which is commendable in the current climate of online discussion.
      • Krollifi 6y ago
        Some of the reasons HN is civil is that it covers a niche area and quickly flags things that are highly contraversial such as politics and race relations. I just checked and 8kun.top is up.
  • uncoder0 6y ago
    >"Obviously all of the insidious planning and hatred that presumably occurred on Parler is abhorrent. I think I can hate all of those things without believing that the site should be censored." I have yet to see any evidence that the capitol protest was planned primarily on Parler. I have seen plenty of evidence that it was planned primarily on Facebook (that has since been deleted/hidden by Facebook). You'd think if the goal was to punish or curtail such events Facebook would be getting at least similar treatment as Parler.
• vinceguidry 6y ago
  This is what polarizing actions do, they force people to choose sides. And as the American right coalesces into two camps, pro-Trump and everyone else, the left is forced to harden around it's majority mindset. And that mindset includes, platforms and megaphones aren't free. The people that built Silicon Valley are liberals, and until called on to protect those liberal values, they'll allow (and make money from) everybody else. If the finger-quote conservatives want their own platform with which they can plot the downfall of American democracy unrestricted, they're going to need their own infrastructure and their own apps and, it's starting to look like soon, their own banks and financial industries to handle their money. You have ANY idea how hard it is to get a bank to overlook a pecuniary interest for a moral one? Apparently you have to erect a gallows on the Capitol lawn.
• dragonwriter 6y ago
  Parler was providing material support to terrorists. Not cutting off Parler would also be providing material support to terrorists. This Administration publicly announced a policy of maximum prosecution of offenses connected in any way to domestic civil unrest, in general (now, at the top this was obviously, though not on its face, politically targeted at their opponents, but the career prosecutors called on to execute the policy are perhaps less likely to apply it narrowly in that way), and, in specific, both the D.C. AG and the US Attorney for the District of Columbia have separately indicated that they will be actively pursuing all connections out from the attack on the Capitol, including incitement, in the DC AG’s case explictly including that which may have been committed by the sitting President’s inner circle, and, though charges would need to be held until after he leaves office, the President himself. There's a reason people are fleeing from any material connection to the terrorists or anyone seen to have a connection who isn't themselves actively cutting ties with them.
  • kfarr 6y ago
    Yes, this is a liability issue for Amazon / AWS. Which has more liability -- keeping them or shutting them off for TOS violation? The answer is easy.
  • alacombe 6y ago
    > Parler was providing material support to terrorists So is Twitter, by having Iranian leaders account left alone.
• franklampard 6y ago
  eeewwww
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
  In the early 1990s, if you wanted to have an online presence you needed to buy hardware, connect it to the internet and run some software on it. If Parler had done this, the ways they could have been "destroyed" would have been: 1. refusal to provide DNS for their address 2. refusal to certify an SSL certificate (not absolutely required but more than just a detail in 2021) 3. refusal by an ISP to carry their bits I believe that even the progressive end of the tech community would have been extremely negative about any company that did any of these 3 things. I also think its very unlikely that any of them would have happened, though the Gab case provides some evidence to the contrary. Instead, Parler followed the unfortunate dumbification of online presence over the last 20-30 years, and instead of doing the above, contracted with a large corporation to take care of things for them. The large corporation decided they didn't want to do that anymore, and Parler lost its online presence. Parler is not exactly unique in having made this choice. But perhaps the consequence of the choice they made might convince more people/organizations/corporations to think a bit more clearly about the type of hosting infrastructure they really want/need. If Parler had followed the self-hosted pathway, I think it is extremely unlikely (though sure, not impossible) that they would be offline at this point.
  • dgellow 6y ago
    DNS can clearly be a target, same for TLS certificates.
  • Gollapalli 6y ago
    Even DNS services are kicking people off. AR15, a widely trafficked gun forum with an e-commerce store was just kicked off of GoDaddy. https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/amazon-godaddy-boots-gun-site https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/amazon-godaddy-boots...
    • PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
      I don't the know the details of that case (and I don't expect the WE reporter does either). It seems as if GoDaddy refused to continue hosting the site. That's quite different from providing just DNS for a server owned and administered by the organization.
• dgellow 6y ago
  Next will be DNS, then encryption. If you’re more than 25 old you already know this.
• vernie 6y ago
  Greenwald flushed his whole-ass reputation down the toilet for Trump, much like Giuliani. Ya hate to see it.
• ogre_codes 6y ago
  If a site did nothing but post links to copyrighted/ pirated songs, it would get banned. We know this because we've seen it happen over and over. If a site posted links to houses where people were on vacation and discussed best ways to break into them. It would get banned. Nobody would complain. Why is it that a site which is essentially built to allow people to discuss violent crimes against people is supposed to be tolerated? We should tolerate it because it's discussing violent crimes against politicians? I don't even think it's limited to that regardless. Parler was created so people could discuss things which were banned on other sites for being too violent and had too much hate speech. It's unofficial charter is based on supporting criminal activities. I don't understand why people are acting like this is free speech when so many similar crime-based sites are not tolerated.
  • 99_00 6y ago
    >Parler was created so people could discuss things which were banned on other sites for being too violent and had too much hate speech. It's unofficial charter is based on supporting criminal activities. Can you provide a source for this?
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    • ogre_codes 6y ago
      A source for what?
      • baobabKoodaa 6y ago
        A source for the claims presented in the parent post; that Parler was mainly used/intended for awful things.
        • ogre_codes 6y ago
• sershe 6y ago
  As someone who makes a boatload of money in large part because tech companies are not regulated, I have to say - it's time to regulate large platforms like utilities. You cannot cut someone's power because they broadcast a death threat from their house. All you can do is sue (if that). It should be the same with oligopolistic cloud and social media platforms, since "breaking them up" doesn't really seem workable.
  • chrischattin 6y ago
    I agree 100%. The mega-tech corporations enjoy legal protection as a platform vs a publisher. They are clearly taking an opinionated stance re content moderation and should lose their legal protections as a platform and become liable for content like a traditional publisher.
    • vladTheInhaler 6y ago
      "If you said "Once a company like that starts moderating content, it's no longer a platform, but a publisher" I regret to inform you that you are wrong." https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200531/23325444617/hello-youve-been-referred-here-because-youre-wrong-about-section-230-communications-decency-act.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200531/23325444617/hello...
      • chrischattin 6y ago
        Oh, I know. I was saying they should lose their status as platforms if they are going to be un-equatable in moderation - which they clearly are.
        • nobody9999 6y ago
          No. You apparently don't. There is no distinction between "platform" and "publisher" in Section 230. And you can't "lose" your section 230 protections. Section 230 protects every person and every device in the US. There are no limitations to that. Because Section 230 isn't what you think it is. The important part says (paraphrase): "You can't be sued for something another person says." Full stop. That other person can be sued. If you personally engage in illegal or tortious activity, you can be prosecuted or sued. But you can't be prosecuted or sued for what someone else says. That's Section 230. That's it. Full stop.
• chmod600 6y ago
  Is Parler content, or a service? If the former, then taking it down seems reasonable. If the latter, horrifying. Of course it's both, like all social media. The content is horrible now, but it's quite possible -- likely even -- that it would have broadened quite a bit. It was a likely home not just for political extremists, but also quite acceptable content that's being deplatformed elsewhere, like firearms-related content.
• kwindla 6y ago
  Ben Thompson provides a more nuanced analysis, including useful background for engaging with a lot of the questions posed in the threads here: https://stratechery.com/2021/internet-3-0-and-the-beginning-of-tech-history/ https://stratechery.com/2021/internet-3-0-and-the-beginning-...
• nipponese 6y ago
  Uhhh, no. If you know you are going to be attracting users with some extreme views, make sure you have a strategy to scale up your moderation tools and staff, or at least APPEAR to be doing it. Their "oh, it's just too hard to moderate" argument is pretty pathetic. Even Youtube, in the make or break moment with copyright holders, struck a deal with Viacom so that they may survive. That's how you build a "tech" company.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• kemitchell 6y ago
  Does AWS monopolize cloud services? The complaint Parler filed in its lawsuit against AWS cites 30% market share. It also mentions they've been unable to find another hosting company, though it doesn't go into why. The antitrust claim wasn't that AWS cut them off. That was the breach of contract claim. The antitrust claim was based on allegations that AWS and Twitter just did a multi-year cloud deal, and conspired to shut Parler down. Section 1 anticompetitive conduct claim. IIRC, the relevant market was microblogging, not cloud infra. The Nadler Committee report Glenn cites puts AWS at 24% of US spend and "close to half" of global spend on cloud services. US courts don't typically find "market power" below 50% in the relevant market. The concept of abusing "dominant position", mentioned over and over in the report, comes from European competition law, not US antitrust law. Anecdotally, I use cloud services and I don't use AWS at all anymore. As an attorney who advises on terms of service for cloud services, I'd also expect every major cloud platform has broad "acceptable use" or similar terms that let them refuse or terminate customers that cause more problems---law enforcement requests, law suits, marketing crises---than they're worth. A number of my cloud clients rack their own iron. Others intentionally seek out providers and services with permissive or aligned activist reputations. Those services often cost more, both because they're smaller and because they deal with more warrants, lawsuits, DMCA takedowns, &c. &c. &c. I personally prefer to patronize smaller, upstart providers. Which is only possible if you don't bite the hooks---k8s, vendor-specific APIs, and so on.
• SassyGrapefruit 6y ago
  "free speech" is like the power of pardon. In that until toxic individuals insisted on testing its most extreme boundaries it was allowed to remain, in theory, nearly unlimited. "Free Speech" is a great thing when it's used with wisdom and solid judgment. It can be a vehicle for insight, innovation, and new ways to think about the world. This reflects the constructive uses of "free speech" If you look at the other side of the coin you have these eruptions of toxic individualism. The power of "free speech" isn't used for constructive reasons. Instead it's a show of force. I am going to say this and there is nothing you can do to stop me. This has continued even as we see real material setbacks manifest because of this capricious use of "free speech" Returning for a moment to the power of the pardon. It's likely we will see that power reigned in. It was never scrutinized before because the wielders of that power always used it responsibly and judiciously. I think we're going to have to turn the same scrutiny to speech on the internet. In the end you can point the fingers at the selfish few that ruined a good thing for the rest of us.
  • ndiscussion 6y ago
    > toxic individuals Are you perhaps referring to Bill Clinton, who pardoned Susan Rosenberg, a convicted terrorist that set off a bomb in US federal buildings and committed armed robberies?
    • dragonwriter 6y ago
      > Are you perhaps referring to Bill Clinton, who pardoned Susan Rosenberg, a convicted terrorist that set off a bomb in US federal buildings and committed armed robberies? Bill Clinton did not pardon her, he commuted her sentence to the 16+ years she had already served. Commutation and pardon are significantly different.
      • ndiscussion 6y ago
        In practice how are they different? Would you find it appropriate to "commute" the sentence of any other terrorists?
• jxramos 6y ago
  > That is because three Silicon Valley monopolies — Amazon, Google and Apple — abruptly united to remove Parler from the internet, exactly at the moment when it became the most-downloaded app in the country. I think I heard this point before about it trending to most popular for a fleeting moment. Does anyone have specific dates when that occurred and how long that trend lasted? Where exactly is this information conveyed, in the app stores themselves? Is there some archived location I can go look up to verify the veracity of the claim?
• blank_fan_pill 6y ago
  How is this a show of monopolistic force? Its like a a half dozen interdependently owned companies each choosing on their own to not associate with Parler. If you piss off everyone at the same time and everyone decides to not do business with you, thats not a monopoly issue.
  • ipsum2 6y ago
    This article makes me sad, because I used to support Greenwald. It's surprising he doesn't know the definition of monopoly (i.e. Amazon, Google, Facebook, Twitter do not compose a monopoly).
    • kats 6y ago
      In the US there are two mobile OS options (Android and iOS) with a combined 99.8% market share. And large companies like Microsoft (Windows Mobile), Amazon (Fire OS), and Samsung (Tizen) haven't been able to grow their market share, so the barrier to entry seems pretty high.
      • PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
        even if that's true (it is and it isn't, but the pedantry isn't important), what you're saying is effectively is that a duopoly over mobile devices is the same as a monopoly over the internet. that's patently untrue. it's untrue in the simplistic sense that you can access the internet with non-mobile technology, and its even untrue in the slightly less simplistic sense that an organization can provides its online presence as a website (gasp!) so as to avoid the need to have an app available on corporately-controlled stores.
        • deleted 6y ago
          [deleted]
      • Udik 6y ago
        > two mobile OS options (Android and iOS) with a combined 99.8% market share Not to mention the fact that if you're kicked out of only one of the two you're basically finished if you live on network effect. If Google decided to kick Whatsapp out of the Android store, even those who have iPhones would have no reason to use it any more.
• jjtheblunt 6y ago
  Why aren't Google, Apple, AWS free to dissociate themselves from trouble brewing?
• ryan_j_naughton 6y ago
  I'm more concerned about the app store bans than AWS ban. The app stores are true monopolies that as gatekeepers to users loading apps on phones (particularly so in apple's case). There isn't really any alternative to them. In contrast, a hosting solution can be swapped out for another hosting solution. While non-trivial (especially if you are using a bunch of AWS specific services), there are viable solutions. Parler has already found a new hosting solution with epik. [1] Given that anyone can host a website (potentially even by buying their own bare metal hardware and procuring IP addresses), then one always has the ability to disseminate one's ideas. The "public square" equivalent is simply having your content online as it is available for all to read / consume. That does not entitle you to speech on other people's platforms. That is the equivalent of saying you should have the right to go into a private venue, hosting a private event, and espouse your ideas. I've long thought that we should reinterpret campaign finance law from this perspective. Specifically, that because the internet enables anyone to get their ideas published and accessible, then we should remove the ability of political campaigns to buy ANY advertisements. Having the right to speak should not be expanded to having the right to BUY eyeballs / impressions. You should be able to speak all you want, freely, on the internet. But all traffic should be earned, organic traffic from folks actually wanting to listen to you. The ability to use targeted advertising to target specific messages to specific political segments seems disingenuous. It allows the politician to choose their voter instead of the voter to choose to listen to their politician. It is like digital gerrymandering. Given that a politician can easily host videos, content, etc that can literally be consumed by the entire planet with relative ease (not to belittle the complexity of youtube), free speech exists fundamentally in the foundation of the internet / web. Attacks on those fundamental components of the internet are concerning though. For example, SciHub having its domain names revoked and thus being unable to have DNS properly route to their servers is of grave concern. But the recent developments of NextDNS and similar decentralized DNS solutions are promising [2]. [1] https://www.businessinsider.com/parler-moves-to-epik-domain-known-for-hosting-far-right-2021-1 https://www.businessinsider.com/parler-moves-to-epik-domain-... [2] https://www.coindesk.com/pirated-academic-sci-hub-handshake https://www.coindesk.com/pirated-academic-sci-hub-handshake
• throwaway111z 6y ago
  It feels like the tech giants are dipping their toes into partisan politics and they don't like the message more than the tactics. For example, if BLM had occupied the capital does anyone think that BLM would have been removed from the big tech platforms within two days or the response would be remotely similar? Although BLM is a much better cause, there were fringe elements that advocated violence for change that received no widespread tech backlash. Furthermore, there were BLM protests for months in nearly every state capital and Seattle had an occupied portion for weeks with no similar response. Sure, perhaps in this case BLM is such a better cause than Trump's election shenanigans. However, couldn't someone on the center or right could see this as a problematic precedent? Today it's clear cut, but in the future it could be 'agree with the left or be 'cancelled''?
• kats 6y ago
  If Apple and Google can do whatever they want on their platform (where they have a combined 99.8% market share in the US), then what's to stop AT&T/Verizon/CenturyLink/Comcast from doing whatever they want on their platform, the internet?
  • ip26 6y ago
    The carrier who provides your physical location service is more comparable to a utility or the postal service than are Apple or Google.
    • kats 6y ago
      Ok, but I assume (could be wrong) that's because of the difficulty of creating your own water/sewage/electric service. But isn't it comparably difficult to create your own app store or payment processor?
      • ip26 6y ago
        It's not just difficulty- it's really not a good thing for anybody if you have three different sewers and four different electrical service lines running to your house. It's expensive, wasteful, a mess, and can even degrade quality of service. But a variety of app stores or payment processors functioning over a common carrier (ISP, USPS) is a good thing.
• arbuge 6y ago
  > "That is because three Silicon Valley monopolies — Amazon, Google and Apple — abruptly united to remove Parler from the internet, exactly at the moment when it became the most-downloaded app in the country. If one were looking for evidence to demonstrate that these tech behemoths are, in fact, monopolies that engage in anti-competitive behavior in violation of antitrust laws, and will obliterate any attempt to compete with them in the marketplace, it would be difficult to imagine anything more compelling than how they just used their unconstrained power to utterly destroy a rising competitor." I'm not buying the premise of this argument. If anything, Parler, a social network, was a (diminutive) competitor to Facebook and Twitter. Amazon, Google and Apple do not come to mind as companies standing to gain by destroying it. The author seems to have an axe to grind against companies he perceives as monopolies and is stretching the facts to support his world view.
  • totalZero 6y ago
    My own personal speculation: The timeline of events almost feels like Google, Apple, and Amazon took those steps as part of a means to convince Twitter to commit to a ban. Without Parler, Twitter is able to stem any right-wing exodus due to a Trump ban.
  • ketamine__ 6y ago
    Parler isn't competing with Twitter. The users on Parler are persona non grata on Twitter.
• sabhiram 6y ago
  While I understand the motive for the article, should service provider companies really have to be egalitarian? What happened to the likes of "No shoes, no shirt, no service"?
• Zigurd 6y ago
  Questions like "do we really want a handful of unelected billionaires deciding what is acceptable speech" are getting ahead of the game. First, why was it that these supposedly too-powerful tech giants could be intimidated into allowing activity that was clearly against ToS to go on for years before they grew a pair? "Free speech" in privately owned spaces is a difficult problem. i would settle for even handed enforcement of ToS and a more transparent ToS appeal process.
• avelis 6y ago
  If this is a call to regulate the internet then it is now a utility and must be treated as such. That would essentially have to ask big tech to be broken up. The model we have now does not treat the internet and its platforms as a utility. I am not sure if we can even do a middle ground. It is either one or the other.
• firstSpeaker 6y ago
  We have discussed this in my workplace (a bank) to reconsider lifting our k8s and shifting it to a cloud provider from our data centres. I imagine this is a conversation many other companies re going to have specially when those companies are outside of USA and using US companies services.
• strangattractor 6y ago
  Legally they have the right to refuse service but ethically they owe the public. However "Free Speech" does not entitle people to Freely Lie. As we have seen the wrong words from the right person can cause the loss of life. The police officer did not deserve to die to further the political ambitions of a few morally/ethically bankrupt individuals. Parler can recreate itself on another platform if they wish. Gab is still up. It is just as disgusting. The Constitution only guarantees that Congress shall pass no laws prohibiting free speech. The last time I checked Amazon or Twitter cannot pass legislation. Free speech is prevented by the use of force. We held an election. The results where not what some people liked. They tried to cancel the people's voice. That is the real speech suppression here.
• beaunative 6y ago
  Many comments here mentioned free speech though constitution only stipulates that congress should make no law abridging the freedom of speech. Surely a person is within his rights to reject such protest happening in his own backyard when it comes to the right to assembly. Why can't Apple, a private company, forbid an app from its own appstore? It is a matter of monopoly, if Apple, Google and Facebook alike are acting like market regulators, since they together owns the market itself when it comes to mobile app consumption, which is traditionally something only the government is capable of doing.
• viktorcode 6y ago
  From the piece: > It is true that one can find postings on Parler that explicitly advocate violence or are otherwise grotesque. It is the same to me as saying “it is true one can find sexually explicit images of children on a dark net pedo site”. Parler was made to harbour the kind of content which is getting purged by any platform caring about not appearing as a Daily Stormer outpost.
• ilogik 6y ago
  seriously, fuck greenwald. he's an idiot https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1190700971233619968 https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1190700971233619968
• totalZero 6y ago
  The speculated anticompetitive behavior wouldn't be described as monopolistic, it'd be horizontal conduct. Tsk tsk, Greenwald.
• pfdietz 6y ago
  How Silicon Valley, fearing prosecution under 18 U.S. Code § 2383, dropped Parler like radioactive waste.
• jbrun 6y ago
  America is so blinded by their love of free speech they fail to see that most countries operate quite well with modest limits on speech. If American style free speech were so great the country would not be tearing itself apart as we speak.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• jandrese 6y ago
  Does anybody know a place where moderate conservative can have adult conversations? No Q-Anon nonsense. No white supremacy. No baseless accusations against political opponents. A place where people carefully consider their positions, post research from reputable sources, and avoid the absolute nuttery that infests all of the conservative spaces on Reddit, Parler, Facebook, Twitter, etc...? One of the reasons moderate Republicans are going the way of the Dodo is they have no place to form a community. It seems like every time someone starts one the entire place immediately veers off into whackjob city.
  • defen 6y ago
    No, because "moderate conservative" is not a stable political position, at least as far as social issues go. It really consists of people who are comfortable with things how they are and who oppose liberal attempts to remove unprincipled exceptions to liberalism. Liberals have a vision of what they are fighting for, conservatives only have something they are fighting against. The one exception to this which has had some political success is abortion, because it has been successfully framed as fighting for the rights of the unborn. Consider the "moderate conservative" opinion 100 years ago on women having the vote; compared to today's moderate conservative. Or on segregation 60 years ago. Or on gay marriage 20 years ago. Or on transgender issues today vs what will be considered "moderate conservative" 20 years from now. The only cohesion they do have is on economic issues, but people are finally starting to realize that it's been a grift all along, perpetuated by big business and conservative establishment elites. "We'll pander to you on social issues (and then fold like a house of cards) in exchange for moving your job overseas, importing workers to reduce labor costs, and lowering taxes on the rich" So given this loss of trust in the conservative establishment, people find themselves rootless and end up finding a community in this sort of nuttery (whether it be Q-Anon or ethnostate fantasies). Barring a return to throne-and-altar conservatism (which seems unlikely) I don't see it getting better any time soon.
    • jandrese 6y ago
      It doesn't have to be a "stable" political position for people to have principled discussion. In fact I'd expect any community to drift as the norms of society change. Granted, Conservatives should resist such change because that's what it means to be conservative, but it doesn't mean you set a marker in the sand and never deviate. That would be reactionary.
• brlewis 6y ago
  Here is the most important paragraph in the article. Can anyone confirm or refute the part about Parler's TOS and moderation? It is true that one can find postings on Parler that explicitly advocate violence or are otherwise grotesque. But that is even more true of Facebook, Google-owned YouTube, and Twitter. And contrary to what many have been led to believe, Parler’s Terms of Service includes a ban on explicit advocacy of violence, and they employ a team of paid, trained moderators who delete such postings. Those deletions do not happen perfectly or instantaneously — which is why one can find postings that violate those rules — but the same is true of every major Silicon Valley platform.
  • germinalphrase 6y ago
    I cannot; however, I heard the CEO of Parler say on a podcast on Jan 7 that moderation decisions were made by (I’m paraphrasing as closely as I can) “a random jury of the user’s peers. If the jury decides the content doesn’t break the TOS, it remains”.
• jacksonkmarley 6y ago
  The discussion here focuses on the free speech aspect of online platforms as applied to private companies. This seems like a topic where a political solution is called for, as there seems to be enough opinion on both sides to warrant an examination of the current laws. Certainly many people seem to feel that somehow these social media platforms now represent a type of public platform. I wonder if the united States at this point is capable of that discussion? In a healthy democratic political process as applied to this issue, there probably needs to be input from both the free speech side and the societal protection side, and some compromise legal solution reached. If Biden follows through on his rhetoric that seems possible, but that seems like a big if, with political power apparently firmly in Democratic hands for the next couple of years at least.
• tristanb 6y ago
  Im glad it's gone. It was a vile cesspool of miss-information, hate and violent fantasies. Whats next - havens for kiddy porn?
• FredDollen 6y ago
  Think of this analogy: Almost every driver in the US breaks traffic laws every time they drive. They speed, cross a line, don't come to a complete stop at stop signs, etc. Imagine that there was a company in charge of doling out violations, and only conservative drivers were having their licenses revoked. Every platform has people who violate the TOS, and by that standard, they all should be deplatformed. But that is not happening. You cannot say with any level of proof that Parler was worse at moderating content than any of the other social platforms
  • ketamine__ 6y ago
    There are plenty of conservatives on Twitter and Facebook. Being a conservative doesn't get you banned. Being a shitty person gets you banned. Those that stormed the capitol will be able to hang out in jail together and share their conservative ideas. It's a great compromise. Free food too.
• SonOfThePlower 6y ago
  All people, regardless of their worldview, left- and right-wing, should be aware that they are in the same boat on this.
• wilsynet 6y ago
  When we used to talk about "monopolies", we referred to specific private enterprises. But these companies aren't actually monopolies. Facebook doesn't have a monopoly on social networking, there's Twitter and TikTok and Snap too. AWS doesn't have a monopoly on cloud infra, there's GCP and Azure and Oracle and Digital Ocean too. The author knows that these companies aren't actually monopolies, so he insinuates that the whole region (Silicon Valley) is a monopoly. And one of these companies (Amazon) it isn't even located in the Silicon Valley region; it's located in the state of Washington. So really the author has expanded the target of the ire to a whole industry. That is to say, the tech industry has a monopoly on the tech industry.
  • Miner49er 6y ago
    If Amazon isn't a monopoly (or at least close) then why is Amazon facing action or under investigation for antitrust from Congress, the European Union, the DOJ and 3 states?
    • wilsynet 6y ago
      The European Commission is investigating Amazon based on "distorting competition in online retail markets" [1]. I don't see a claim by the commission that Amazon is a monopoly. You can be investigated and have antitrust related actions applied to you without actually being a monopoly [2]. Further, the investigation is related to Amazon's retail marketplace business, not Amazon as a provider of cloud infrastructure. What is congress investigating Amazon for? I think you need to be more specific. 1. https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_20_2077 https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_20_... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_antitrust_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_antitrust_law "In the United States, antitrust law is a collection of federal and state government laws that regulate the conduct and organization of business corporations and are generally intended to promote competition for the benefit of consumers."
    • minhazm 6y ago
      In what way could AWS possibly be a monopoly? They definitely don't have a monopoly on retail sales. They don't have a monopoly on cloud either. Now are they competitive? Maybe, but that's not the same thing as being a monopoly.
• 99_00 6y ago
  I see a lot of people saying that Parler was only used to promote hate. How where they able to determine this?
• foolinaround 6y ago
  a big issue is being missed. Apple, while accusing Parler of not monitoring what it users send, technically is guilty of the same, when users send SMS messages to each other to bomb a place. Now that Apple is enforcing tenants on its platform such as de-platforming Parler, it should also be held responsible for the actions of any other app ( left or right wing), since it has stepped up to do that. If this is not acceptable, all talk of free speech is really hogwash.
• stuart78 6y ago
  This take strikes my as a bit absurd. You have to take a pretty all-encompassing view of 'tech' for it to make sense. Apple success on the shoulders of a wide app developer ecosystem, not on the narrower set of other tech titans. Google, via Android, is in a similar spot. And AWS is even further afield. Two names not included in the de-platforming accusations here are Facebook and Twitter. If anybody of the tech titans were to benefit from this cynical take on the actions against Parler, it was them. SV is not one entity, and each of the five listed above has very different goals for themselves, so I'm pretty skeptical of this conspiratorial perspective. I understand the sense that these things are monopolistic, but of course there are real alternatives. They are harder, and more expensive, but the cost is borne by the transgressor of pretty reasonable common norms (don't tolerate promotion of violence). Parler gets to join Stormfront and all the torrent sites on the lower decks not because Apple, Google and Amazon are knocking out nascent competition, but because those sites violate reasonable, privately set and moderated rules.
• frazras 6y ago
  Is it ok to say that anything I can put on a placard and walk around a city displaying without getting arrested or breaking any law should be considered acceptable free speech on the internet? Just trying to separate the medium from the message.
• peter_d_sherman 6y ago
  First off, I like Glenn Greenwald very much as a journalist. Remember that he and Laura Poitras helped Edward Snowden disclose to the world what he did, in 2013. In other words, as a journalist, he does, or should command a huge amount of respect from the HN community. He has my respect. Now, with that as a background, let's talk about this article. It's an important article, and yes, broadly speaking, the claims that are made are true. But the problem I have with this article (and not with Glenn Greenwald personally, who again, is a great journalist!) is that it's a little bit too broad... To give you an understanding of this, let's say that in the future, I ran an online service with an App Store, like Apple or Google. OK, so now, for whatever reason, the Parler App is removed from the App Store that I run. But, to tell me (and the newsreader) that it was an act of Tech Tyranny, of Monopolistic Force -- is not good enough. You see, I believe in several things: 1) Strong Logging 2) Chain Of Command 3) Chain Of Custody But most importantly, the "5 Whys": 4) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_whys https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_whys In other words, I'd like (as a member of the public) an "organizational backtrace", starting with the engineer who physically removed the App from the app store, moving from there to his manager that ordered it, and moving from there up levels of management. In other words, WHO ordered WHAT, WHEN, and WHY. In other words, don't start with the highest level effect, the silencing of free speech, start with the lowest level effect -- the physical removal of the App from the App Store by the engineer that did it. From that point, use the 5 WHYS to work backward, something like, "OK, this engineer did this because he was ordered to by his manager", so WHY did the manager do it?, "Because he was ordered to by his manager", etc. But now the question arises -- Who was at the highest level of management at that company that gave that order? And now we ask WHY again... so we need to talk to him, and find out exactly WHY (what socio-political-moral-ethic-legal-or-whatever pressure was applied to him, and how?) See, answer all of those questions, and THEN you have the true story! But all this being said, I do love Glenn Greenwald!
• bo1024 6y ago
  What bothers me about this article is that it tries to present a logical argument that tech monopolies are a problem, wrapped in a political rhetoric about how liberals are authoritarian. It starts off as an interesting perspective but ends up as inflammatory whataboutism that doesn't engage deeply with the issue. This is a really interesting moment in history to think about censorship, platforms, speech, and monopoly. We can do a lot better than this article.
• tdullien 6y ago
  Perhaps mine is a bit of a strange/controversial view among the HN crowd - but I find the conflation of "right to free speech" and "right to a platform for said speech" to be odd. I don't agree that "infringement of free speech" can happen in a commercial context. The right to free speech is the right that you cannot have government force act on you for what you are saying; e.g. the government has no right to tell you "don't say this or it will have consequences". As for private contracts: Trying to enforce "free speech" that must not be infringed upon in private contracts would also mean all NDAs are always void, and would be a huge intrusion into another liberty: That of entering into arbitrary agreements with each other. The .cn regulator cracking down on Ant Financial because they did not like what Jack Ma said is an infringement on free speech. A private business actor deciding to terminate a contract because they don't like the business partner is not. Related: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/midtown-uniform-patagonia-will-no-longer-sell-vests-with-finance-firms-logos-on-them/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/midtown-uniform-patagonia-will-...
  • peteretep 6y ago
    It’s worth taking a step back here too and remembering that the speech Parler is being kicked off AWS for isn’t protected under 1FA either. There is no protection for calls to violence.
    • gwright 6y ago
      Well, is it Parler's speech or the speech of it users? I don't think anyone has asserted that Parler or its employees are advocating violence.
      • three_seagrass 6y ago
        Parler's inaction and bad faith moderation has enabled the calls to violence. This is a violation of AWS's TOS which is why they're breaking it.
        • gwright 6y ago
• VikingCoder 6y ago
  > The platform was created based in libertarian values of privacy, anti-surveillance, anti-data collection, and free speech. I'm sorry, but parts of this are not true. Liberals were banned. [1] That's anti "free speech." Parler only did a soft delete of data, flagging it as deleted, rather than removing it from servers. [2] That's anti "anti-data collection". [1] : https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200627/23551144803/as-predicted-parler-is-banning-users-it-doesnt-like.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200627/23551144803/as-pr... [2] : https://mashable.com/article/parler-archive-user-posts/ https://mashable.com/article/parler-archive-user-posts/
• Miner49er 6y ago
  Glenn is wrong that Parler is pro-free speech. They censor all kinds of things, including those with different political views. https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200630/23525844821/parler-speedruns-content-moderation-learning-curve-goes-we-allow-everything-to-were-good-censors-days.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200630/23525844821/parle...
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • mtlynch 6y ago
    I've never used Parler, but I find it strange that most of the discussion around it is based on characterizations of the platform without evidence, so I was interested to see an article with actual evidence. But the evidence in this article didn't seem to match the claims. To prove that Parler banned people with different political views, they show a screenshot of CEO John Matze posting this message: >To all the ANTIFA supporters who have been spinning up Parler accounts... next time you should leave your chat server private... Im pretty sad you guys kicked me out... PS. Your VPNs can't save you The article author treats that as evidence that Matze indiscriminately kicked out people who identify as part of Antifa. I think it's hard to tell from that screenshot alone, but my reading of the quote is that Matze found a public chat server where Antifa members were conspiring to create Parler accounts strictly for the sake of disrupting the platform. I don't view this as political censorship. The article also paints Matze as hypocritical for banning Parler users who disrupt conversations by spamming porn or pictures of feces. That doesn't seem hypocritical to me, either. You can be welcoming to alternative viewpoints while still enforcing rules that encourage constructive discussion.
    • Miner49er 6y ago
      Yeah you might be right about the antifa post, but the CEO should call them spammers and trolls instead of ANTIFA then, because the he's banning spammers or trolls then, not people specifically for being antifa. He also shouldn't be publicly posting in an excited way about banning them. Finally, only right-wingers and generally people who don't like antifa capitalize every letter of ANTIFA, so that just further makes this post horrible PR, and seems like he's gleefully banning political views he doesn't agree with.
• AaronM 6y ago
  Honest Question. At what point do service providers like AWS become utilities? Should they?
  • jredwards 6y ago
    ISPs, plausibly. But that's because physical infrastructure is such an important component. It's the same reason you generally only have a single choice for an ISP. THAT's the problem there, and that's why there's a good argument for ISPs to be utilities, and why net neutrality is so important. Hosting and domain registration are commoditized services. If one doesn't want to do business with you (or vice versa) there are thousands of other options.
• AzzieElbab 6y ago
  You ban people from Twitter they go to Parler, you destroy Parler they go somewhere else where no opposite point of view will ever be herd and no dialog can ever happen. This is how you create domestic isis. Is there a patriot act 2.0 already in the making to guard US from this self made media sponsored disaster?
  • jackson1442 6y ago
    By domestic ISIS do you mean an organization that attempts to take over the capital to abduct and/or kill politicians and stop a democratic election?
    • AzzieElbab 6y ago
      Yeap. Let’s make sure all Parlers users end up on q and see what happens? You understand that a larger number of radicals will eventually produce radically different results than the yahoos you mentioned? Or do you think the Viking guy who is not eating in prison because food is not organic was the real threat?
  • Deestan 6y ago
    It's not an absolute. The more work it is to find the current hiding hole, the harder it's going to be for them to recruit and groom more terrorists from the populace.
    • AzzieElbab 6y ago
      Sorry but that sounds more like sticking your own head in the sand. Wishing for some people to go away doesn’t it actually make them disappear
  • rubatuga 6y ago
    They’re not banning people from Twitter (except Trump). So all those people from Parler can just go back to using Twitter.
    • 6y ago
• _nothing 6y ago
  > how they just used their unconstrained power to utterly destroy a rising competitor. From the start, this stood out to me as a very faulty premise. How exactly was Parler, a social media site, a competitor to Amazon, Google, or Apple? It would be different if this were Facebook, but we're talking about ecosystems/infrastructure vs a single app/website. Also how can the power of three separate companies be a monopoly? The argument seems to be that Silicon Valley is itself a monopoly, except Silicon Valley is only a geographic location.
• dumpsterdiver 6y ago
  I have a suggestion to keep these conversations from spiraling into pedantry: let's stop using the phrase "free speech" when referring to these companies (I'm going to use it a few more times here though, for illustration), and instead be descriptive and refer to "a group of people having their ideas and voices silenced at scale." Whether we agree with the people being silenced or not, that's what this is really about, right? We don't need names to know what something is. A young scientist might think an elderly aboriginal person foolish because the elder has never heard of a "star", but that doesn't mean the elder hasn't seen the sun rise every day of their life. My point is that we should not be discounting opinions because someone used the wrong word. We're smart enough to read between the lines and see the crux of what is bothering someone. Free speech, as an ideal, doesn't have to refer to any law, but to avoid spiraling into pedantry, I would suggest that we all be more descriptive during the course of these conversations.
• colechristensen 6y ago
  Was it really monopolistic? server hosting isn’t a monopoly, everyone has access to the web on their phone even when app stores drop apps they may have had problems getting managed services on the big providers but there are many many other options
• riccccccc 6y ago
  The whole free speech debate boils down to this, Do you think we have enough freedoms, do you think that every civil liberty is now afforded to everyone. The Civil Rights Movement in the 60s was considered hateful and violent at one point, without free speech they would have been driven into the sea. Gay and Trans rights were once considered not valid speech as well. Without Unregulated and uncontrolled speech. All of these things could have been labeled as hateful speech, hateful to white people or hateful to the traditional family unit. Any talk about limiting speech by the government or social media only dictates that we have enough freedoms and liberties and anything new that comes up is fair game to be labeled as "hate speech"
• craexs 6y ago
  There is no "right to be broadcast" or "right to be published" in the right to free speech. You have the right to say it, but you don't have the right to force others to listen, read or see it - nor are publishers or conduits required to broadcast or transmit it. Your online "self" does not exist. There is no such thing as a right to free speech in an online sense as there is no shared utility that must accept all speech. Every step of the way is owned by a business - be it your ISP (which is not a utility - at least at the moment), a platform provider, or content publisher, or web infrastructure provider. All of them can and do have Terms of Use that any user must comply with in order to use their service. Unless/until that changes, any discussion of "right" to free speech online is patently ridiculous.
• DarknessFalls 6y ago
  This is so stupid. Silicon Valley is not a company or a federation, so the charge of "monopolistic force" is false. It's just a hub of innovation. Parler is a terrorist network.
• dredmorbius 6y ago
  Greenwald’s argument hinges on emotion, insinuation, invective, a completely unfounded premise, an absolute absence of evidence, and no consideration of alternative explanations: an overwhelmingly plausible ongoing law enforcement and national security operation, likely under sealed or classified indictments or warrants, in the face of ongoing deadly sedition lead by the President of the United States himself, including against the person of his own vice president and credible threats against the President-Elect and Inauguration. Such an legal action is, of course, extraordinarily difficult to prove, and I cannot prove it. A key clue for me, however, is the defection not just of Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Stripe, and other tech firms, but of Parler’s legal counsel, who would have to be an exceptionally stealth-mode startup to fit Greenwald’s, or other’s, “it’s the tech monopolists” narrative. I’ve tempered my degree of assurance and language (“plausible” rather than “probable”). Time will tell. But a keen and critical mind such as Grenwald’s should at least be weighing the possibility. He instead seems bent only on piking old sworn enemies, with less evidence or coherence than I offer. This is the crux of Greenwald’s argument. It’s all he’s got: On Thursday, Parler was the most popular app in the United States. By Monday, three of the four Silicon Valley monopolies united to destroy it. I’m no friend of the tech monopolists myself. The power demonstrated here does concern me, greatly. I’ve long railed against Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple, among other tech monopolists. Largely because as monopolies they are power loci acting through their occupation of a common resource, outside common control, and not serving the common weal. Hell: Facebook, Google (YouTube), Reddit, and Twitter played a massive role in creating the current fascist insurrection in the US, along with even more enthusiastic aid and comfort from traditional media, across the spectrum. Damage that will take decades to repair, if ever. But, if my hypothesis is correct, the alternative explanation would bet he opposite of this: the state asserting power over and through monopolies in the common interest, in support of democratic principles, for the common weal. And that I can support. I don’t know that this is the case. I find it curious that I seem to be the only voice suggesting it. Time should tell. And after this is over, yes, Silicon Valley, in its metonymic sense standing for the US and global tech industry, has to face its monopoly problem, its free speech problem (in both sincere and insincere senses), its surveillance problem (capitalist, state, criminal, rogue actor), its censorship problem, its propaganda problem (mass and computational), its targeted manipulation adtech problem, its trust problem, its identity problem, its truth and disinformation problems, its tax avoidance problem, its political influence problem. Virtually all of which are inherent aspects of monopoly: “Propaganda, censorship, and surveillance are all attributes of monopoly” https://joindiaspora.com/posts/7bfcf170eefc013863fa002590d8e506 https://joindiaspora.com/posts/7bfcf170eefc013863fa002590d8e... HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24771470 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24771470 But, speaking as a space alien cat myself, Greenwald is so far off base here he’s exited the Galaxy.
• syngrog66 6y ago
  The pattern of evidence is consistent with Parler being part of Russia's disinfo/anti-democracy attack on the US, along with their asset Trump himself. I cant prove this 100% but is the wise way to bet, given the total context.
• dang 6y ago
  Threads are currently paginated for performance reasons (yes we're working on it) so you need to click More at the bottom of the thread to get to the rest of the comments—or like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25747659&p=2 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25747659&p=2 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25747659&p=3 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25747659&p=3 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25747659&p=4 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25747659&p=4 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25747659&p=5 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25747659&p=5
• dmode 6y ago
  The whole debate has been framed in terms of free speech. Which is misleading. Because, technically, any corporation are free to impose their policies, as long as they abide by the laws of the state. The debate should be pivoted to tech concentration and monopoly. This has been argued by Elizabeth Warren during her presidential run. However, the same people who are complaining about tech's supposed censor of free speech, where vehemently against Warren's plan for tech break up
• crmrc114 6y ago
  Meta: Hey @dang and crew, I just want you all to know how much I love this community and all the hard work you do- reading articles like this makes me aware of how much effort it must take to keep HN a fun civil place. Thank you for all your efforts.
  • baxtr 6y ago
    Totally agree. It’s an island of sanity in the vast sea of insanity out there. Thanks @dang et al!!!
  • listless 6y ago
    Here here. HN seems to be the last bastion of discourse.
• blt 6y ago
  It's funny how the same group of people who say things like "government should get out of the way of business" cry foul as soon as those unregulated businesses do something they don't like.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • nine_k 6y ago
    Do they ask for the state to intervene? Then it is inconsistent. If they are just unhappy with the way their hosting providers behaved, and what arguments they used to explain their eviction, then, well, it's understandable.
    • kriops 6y ago
      If they are asking the state to enforce any contracts/agreements then that is very much consistent with a laissez-faire stance. The 'Freedom of Speech'-line of reasoning is invalid in a laissez-faire context, though it _is_ however an argument I'd expect to bee seen as valid by several large crowds between the political extremes.
      • nine_k 6y ago
        I agree about the freedom of contract, and assume that the terms of service likely included the right of the provider to cancel the service and terminate the contract at any time, without giving any reasons. The problem I see that everyone sees e.g. Parler as so toxic that they expect their reputation to increase, on average, for kicking them away. It's the low tolerance to dissent and the high social opinion pressure what is troubling, not the action.
  • teakettle007 6y ago
    Section 230 of the CDA is the government getting in the way of business; granting these businesses privileged immunity such that they can have all the advantages of operating as a common carrier, while actually operating as a publisher. Take away that government-giveaway, and the problem is solved. The CDA was always a bad idea.
• dcolkitt 6y ago
  I'm generally anti-regulation, but one potential consideration is to apply the same standards of eviction to cloud hosts as we do to landlords. I think we agree that no private platform should be forced to host a tenant that they object to. Yet a landlord isn't allowed to arbitrarily throw you out of your house on a moments notice. Even if your lease is on a month-to-month basis, the law requires giving the tenant a reasonable timeframe to let them find new accommodations. Even if the landlord insists on a contract abrogating this, it's unenforceable. Policy restricts this because 1) landlords generally have very high negotiation power, and 2) tenants rarely read the fine print. It seems to me that both conditions are approximately true for the major cloud providers. If you agree with tenant eviction protections, then you should probably support similar eviction protections for cloud computing. AWS/GCP/Gmail/iCloud could ban you as a customer, but only with 90 days notice. Otherwise, immediate eviction could only occur if it involved legally codified egregious behavior, and would require a court judgement. I think this would eliminate nightmare scenarios where somebody suddenly finds themselves locked out of their Google Drive and Gmail for some algorithmic mishap. But it would put very little operating burden on the cloud providers.
  • nine_k 6y ago
    Suppose I buy 1000 VMs and use them to DDoS something. Should the hosting provider wait for a court decision to stop it?
    • malwarebytess 6y ago
      Kind of an easy question. What do you do if you find out a tenant is cooking drugs on your property? Same kind of thing is going to apply here. I imagine liability in either case is going to be a concern. I'm not worried for the huge hosts.
      • joshuamorton 6y ago
        For a tenant: You call the police and they maybe get arrested. They're still legally allowed to enter the property until you evict them, which takes 30 days or more in most jurisdictions. You might be able to start eviction proceedings. You eventually sue them for damage to the property. For a webhost, you call the police and....well what they're doing isn't illegal so the police have no reason to care. If they were doing something illegal, ultimately the police might ask (or depending on the law, might need to get a court order) to ask you to shutdown the account. At this point, they'd no longer have access to the account. In fact, if you imagine a person who does both on the same day, if they got out on bail, they would still be allowed into the house during the course of the eviction process. So they could continue using the house for a minimum of 30 days. I don't find this comparison to a landlord at all compelling.
• DevKoala 6y ago
  Glenn Greenwald never disappoints me. He is spot on once again. For years all of these conspiracy theories, calls for violence and allegations of fraud make it to the front page of Twitter/Facebook/YouTube for any user that shows interest in similar topics. However, the day that a competitor decides to openly embrace this content, Silicon Valley goes against it like a pack of predators. I guess they want a monopoly in being the only platforms allowed to subvert democracies. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/former-twitter-employees-charged-with-spying-for-saudi-arabia-by-digging-into-the-accounts-of-kingdom-critics/2019/11/06/2e9593da-00a0-11ea-8bab-0fc209e065a8_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/former-twit... https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-48349671 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-48349671
  • mushbino 6y ago
    What he's saying about Parler is easily provable as false: https://www.abc4.com/news/top-stories/i-have-guns-and-ammo-virtual-trail-left-behind-by-trump-supporters-killed-during-capitol-riot/ https://www.abc4.com/news/top-stories/i-have-guns-and-ammo-v... I used to love Glenn, But I don't know what happened to him after Snowden. He's been an unapologetic hypocritical bootlicker ever since.
    • freedomben 6y ago
      I'm not seeing the contradiction here. Are you suggesting that Greenwald denied that Parler was used for planning/coordination? Perhaps you missed this paragraph? > It is true that one can find postings on Parler that explicitly advocate violence or are otherwise grotesque. But that is even more true of Facebook, Google-owned YouTube, and Twitter. And contrary to what many have been led to believe, Parler’s Terms of Service includes a ban on explicit advocacy of violence, and they employ a team of paid, trained moderators who delete such postings. Those deletions do not happen perfectly or instantaneously — which is why one can find postings that violate those rules — but the same is true of every major Silicon Valley platform.
      • brown9-2 6y ago
• TomSwirly 6y ago
  I was a big fan of Glenn Greenwald starting in the W administration. What went wrong with him? The worst is that most of his current criticisms have considerable truth, which he destroys with his focus on bad examples. Yes, it is a bad thing that FAANG have too much power, but removing Parler, a racist hate site where people blatantly plan violent crimes, is the world's most terrible example. There isn't going to be _any_ model of an internet we want to have where sites which encourage violence will be acceptable. So what's his problem?
• ironman1478 6y ago
  A big reason this is happening IMO is due to the inaction of the government. I don't want companies to bring down sites, however the government seemingly actively refuses to take action. There is precedent for limiting free speech in the case of violence apparently https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imminent_lawless_action https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imminent_lawless_action And it seems like there is some correlation with communications being had on Parler and the insurrection on January 6th. It is unclear how this could be enforced in the internet domain, but maybe the website could have huge fines levied against it or criminal charges levied against the founders (so not the posters) if its possible to prove violent intent. Its also not a very slippery slope. We have hate crime laws, but they are notoriously hard to prove. I imagine violent intent on the internet will be similarly hard to prove and only be applied to the extremely obvious cases. Its also a bit weird. Nobody made a huge deal about PornHub (from what I can tell) being forced to take down tons of content due to Visa, because guess what. Its hard to disagree that the source of a lot of content on PornHub is troubling and very likely illegal. This isn't that much different from what Amazon and other companies are doing to Parler. The intent of a lot of posters (even if its a minority) seems to be to incite violence. Parler actively didn't try to monitor the content and boom, it got taken down. I imagine if PornHub didn't make a good faith attempt to remove a lot of content, we'd have seen Amazon (or whoever hosts PornHub).
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • chipsa 6y ago
    Imminent lawless action requires imminence. Also, plenty of people complained about Pornhub being forced to take down content. You were either in a bubble, it's not paying attention. Specifically, that it appears that if you want to avoid getting bullied by online activists through your providers, you also seem to need to have your own bank.
  • throwaway0a5e 6y ago
    Imminent lawless action as defined by the courts is a very high bar. It is going to be very hard for anything posted to a form of asynchronous communication to qualify short of a popular leader telling his followers to commit a specific unlawful act or specifically targeted threats made by people with the means to carry them out. You're right that this will be damn near impossible to enforce except in the most stupidly obvious cases.
• chasd00 6y ago
  was it RMS who warned us about "cloud" anything? right again.
• justanother 6y ago
  I... don't understand? You were an unpopular speech platform. I worked in porn for 20 years. I know what it's like to get kicked out of AWS, so does John Young. Why weren't they dockerized and prepared to move containers and backups at the drop of a hat? Why didn't they have hot spares elsewhere? There are literally thousands of hosting companies running the gamut from penny-ante to larger platforms like Rackspace, operating in a hundred countries, many of which don't know and don't wanna know what you're doing. The same is true to a lesser extent of registries. And Apple/Google kicking you out of their stores? You can still bookmark a mobile-friendly web app onto the home screen of an Apple device. You're not going to lose Qspiracy fans and nazis just because they have to do an extra step to get to your site. Nevermind that maybe, just maybe, if your platform users advocate for violent revolution, you're going to have a harder go of things. Prior to approximately October, 2001, there was a taleban.com too. I didn't read any hand-wringing when they got the axe. Newsflash: At least Tor can't remove you. The simplest explanation is that they saw this coming a mile away (who honestly didn't?) and this is engineered martyrdom.
  • relativeadv 6y ago
    "The simplest explanation is that they saw this coming a mile away (who honestly didn't?) and this is engineered martyrdom." I think its more boring than that. Their platform was built by amateurs who didn't know what they were doing. Things like soft-deleting posts and auto-incrementing post IDs. This is why it was so easily crawled in a day before the shutdown. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/01/parlers-amateur-coding-could-come-back-to-haunt-capitol-hill-rioters/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/01/parle...
    • bsenftner 6y ago
      The whole story smells like a collection of idiots and imbeciles.
    • swat535 6y ago
      Off topic but what's wrong with using auto-increment?
• zeruch 6y ago
  How about "How Parler Destroyed Itself"?
• LambdaTrain 6y ago
  This article deliberately creates a narrative that portrays Google, Amazon, and Apple as alarming monopolistic roles, which has nothing to do with their decisions to remove Parler. The main concern here is national security, instead of showing off their regulation power (which is an aspect these tech giants always try to conceal). The narrative in the article such as "how they just used their unconstrained power to utterly destroy a rising competitor" looks absurd to me. The competitors of parler Is Facebook, Twitter, i.e. social media platforms, NOT Google, Amazon, and Apple. It feels like the author deliberately misused these kinds of association to trigger irrelevant focus.
  • jolincost 6y ago
    Nice reframing! You should definitely work in the spin department of the hegemons. I think it's simply that free speech isn't good for business. Partially because of tarring by association with "outrageous" opinions you didn't snuff out on your totally-not-public-utility-nor-monopoly platform, but mostly because if you don't have free speech, you have controlled speech, and you need $$$omebody to do the controlling, which means money and intimacy with regulators (powaaa)
  • ketamine__ 6y ago
    Removing the folks that use Parler from Twitter is a competitive advantage. If I had to read their garbage every day I would stop using Twitter.
• p1necone 6y ago
  Parler destroyed itself by hosting illegal content while having the fact that it doesn't moderate anything as a core part of it's advertising.
  • freedomben 6y ago
    I think you should read the article again (I'm assuming you did read it before commenting, and must have just missed the relevant parts): > contrary to what many have been led to believe, Parler’s Terms of Service includes a ban on explicit advocacy of violence, and they employ a team of paid, trained moderators who delete such postings. Those deletions do not happen perfectly or instantaneously — which is why one can find postings that violate those rules — but the same is true of every major Silicon Valley platform.
    • royk_ 6y ago
      In AWS’ letter to Parler (https://int.nyt.com/data/documenttools/acc4b9b6a31b55bf/2/output-2.png https://int.nyt.com/data/documenttools/acc4b9b6a31b55bf/2/ou...) they explicitly called out the fact that Parler told them their plan moving forward was to use volunteer moderators. AWS also pointed out clear examples of illegal content that Parler did not remove. Greenwald has a good point to make but it doesn’t appear that all of what he’s asserting is true.
      • freedomben 6y ago
        A whole central point of Parler was that they don't surveil and analyze their users. From reading that letter it seems like that is the problem AWS had with them. AWS wanted them to violate their principles of not surveilling users by introducing automated moderation bots. I would guess AWS had a solid point that without it there's no way Parler could keep up with the moderation, but without knowing more details about what Parler was planning, it's hard to know. Perhaps Parler had an interesting plan to crowd source moderation? Sites like Stack Overflow and Hacker News do that sort of thing with some success (augmented by real moderators). I have no idea if that's what they were thinking of, but it's an interesting thought.
• mlthoughts2018 6y ago
  Yeesh, Greenwald has become a full on shill for the hard right just because he is so sore against Democrats after the 2016 DNC leaks. This is like watching someone with dementia slowly morph into a completely different person. No aspect of what made early journalist Greenwald a champion for democracy is recognizable in this whatsoever. It’s full on Republicanized befuddlement.
• mijoharas 6y ago
  What happened to glenn greenwald? I considered him a respected journalist, but this article doesn't seem like it's either balanced or fact-checked. Has there been something going on with him? is he alright?
  • dragonwriter 6y ago
    > I considered him a respected journalist, but this article doesn't seem like it's either balanced or fact-checked Having started a media outlet but given someone else the Editor in Chief job because he was more interested in being a reporter and didn't want editorial responsibility, he rage-quit to substack on his own because he also didn't like anyone else exercising editorial oversight of his work. It almost seems like the practice of having someone detached from the work of writing a piece that is responsible for assuring balance, fact-checking, etc., is addressed serves a purpose...
• zzleeper 6y ago
  I used to be a fan of Greenwald, but after seeing his failure to condemn the Rs (and Russia), got very disillusioned. Also, he is propagating lies: https://twitter.com/evanchill/status/1349097133186707457?s=20 https://twitter.com/evanchill/status/1349097133186707457?s=2...
  • sthnblllII 6y ago
    Greenwald said of those arrested so far none are known to use parler. That tweet is about people who were at the protest using parlor. How is Greenwald lying?
• angry_octet 6y ago
  Al Queda Media has issued a statement in support of Parler, wishing them success in their campaign to destroy the United States.
• monster2control 6y ago
  OK. This guys an idiot. Just like the developers of Parler are. If you rely completely on third party vendors and don’t understand and know their TOS then you only have yourself to blame. But calling Amazon a monopoly of the cloud is ridiculous. They could use A litany of other providers. Oracle, 1to1, Microsoft, linode, digital ocean, vulture. The list is almost endless. Diversity of hosting is key to uptime and scaling. Also, with a little bit of work, they could deploy open stack on their own servers in a matter of hours to days if they weren’t complete noobs.
  • systemvoltage 6y ago
    Folks, don't forget IBM Cloud please. They're trying.
• birdyrooster 6y ago
  In business, the customer is getting value from the economies of scale of the business, while the business collects their margin to further grow those economies of scale. If the customer is reducing the value for other customers, then they are breaking the virtuous cycle of the business. This is unstable and will result in either the customer or the business being hurt. If the business is hurt, all of its customers are hurt to some degree because the cost will be passed onto them. This is a matter of consumer protection. Bad actors who reduce the value of other customers should not be tolerated. Simply sharing vendors with Parler had costs for other companies and reduced the value from doing business with the vendor.
  • cwkoss 6y ago
    > Bad actors who reduce the value of other customers should not be tolerated. I don't agree with this argument. "Bad" is subjective and changes based on political perspective. If Parler was instead a pro-abortion forum, and it was taken down by a conservative company citing that abortion is an 'act of violence' (I don't agree, but many pro-lifers do) I think we'd see very few of the same voices cheering. Businesses should tolerate some higher-cost customers. Ex. If a restaurant wants to exceed regulatory accessibility requirements to make their business serve disabled clients better, that is a good thing. Similar examples: multilingual support, making female hygiene product freely available, parental leave. This does 'reduce value for other customers' but is a net societal good (and hopefully most customers get some amount of that reduced value back in feeling good about helping people). Some customers costing business more isn't necessarily a bad thing that should be avoided.
• mensetmanusman 6y ago
  Banning Parler will be discussed in business schools for years. This was a huge mistake by SV.
• f430 6y ago
  And that’s to say nothing of the endless number of hypocrisies with Silicon Valley giants feigning opposition to violent rhetoric or political extremism. Amazon, for instance, is one of the CIA’s most profitable partners, with a $600 million contract to provide services to the agency, and it is constantly bidding for more. On Facebook and Twitter, one finds official accounts from the most repressive and violent regimes on earth, including Saudi Arabia, and pages devoted to propaganda on behalf of the Egyptian regime. Does anyone think these tech giants have a genuine concern about violence and extremism? This is the single most powerful paragraph that shows the hypocrisy. However, you can't even talk about this openly anymore. My Chinese peers are saying how much this reminds them of the Cultural Revolution.
  • hcurtiss 6y ago
    Agreed. Their behavior is entirely motivated by the politics.
  • jeremyjh 6y ago
    If I had to guess I'd say they are not much afraid of the Saudi's (who only oppress people somewhere far away) but are afraid of a fascist take-over of the US, since they live here and have most of their money in the US banks.
  • adolph 6y ago
    I wonder if this apparent difference in standards is just standard globalism. Export dirty work to other countries so the homeland seems cleaner. Extract the best and brightest from elsewhere to maintain intellectual advantages. Arab Spring for thee but not for me.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• scelerat 6y ago
  "That is because the dominant strain of American liberalism is not economic socialism but political authoritarianism. " Oh that's rich. There are good reasons to be alarmed by the power these tech giants hold over people's ability to communicate with one another, and Greenwald even talks about a few. But these are weasel words. These are cynical words which are desperately attempting to distract from the gravity of events that precipitated the tech giants' actions. Difficult to entertain bad faith arguments like these.
• jdeibele 6y ago
  So he goes on and on [0] about how great Parler is/was. But what I've seen reported is that: . You were shadow banned until the right users voted you up . To get more privileges, you had to scan photo ID . Influencers were being paid to post "organic" material without disclosing it https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/02/how-parler-app-plans-to-make-money.html https://twitter.com/donk_enby https://twitter.com/donk_enby has a series of posts based on what she found as she downloaded all of Parler. So it was constructed as an echo chamber where people were being paid to push products. [0]"In August, 2018, they created a social media platform similar to Twitter but which promised far greater privacy protections, including a refusal to aggregate user data in order to monetize them to advertisers or algorithmically evaluate their interests in order to promote content or products to them. They also promised far greater free speech rights, rejecting the increasingly repressive content policing of Silicon Valley giants." This sounds a lot like Fox News claim of being "Fair and Balanced". You might think their point of view is fair but there's no way that it's balanced.
  • garbagetime 6y ago
    None of those things seem to contradict the claim that Parler was great (a claim, which, by the way, is not made in your citation).
  • chrononaut 6y ago
    While obviously a timely example for Glenn to refer to, it is a strange counter example for him to refer to when he makes arguments that "Silicon Valley" is attempting to manipulate a narrative.[0][1][2] One could argue that a platform that is explicitly against the average political opinion of SV's employee base may be at a disadvantage, I am not sure Parler was the hill to stake that claim on. [0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/07/15/parler-conservative-twitter-alternative/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/07/15/parler-... [1] https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200627/23551144803/as-predicted-parler-is-banning-users-it-doesnt-like.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200627/23551144803/as-pr... [2] https://twitter.com/donk_enby/status/1347939939120533506 https://twitter.com/donk_enby/status/1347939939120533506
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• AndrewKemendo 6y ago
  What all these companies (Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Visa etc...) did was textbook market coordination [1]. Nothing illegal or crazy about it, it happens all the time on different levels. What people should be griping about is that they put so much faith and trust into private organizations that are not the commons or public services and have no obligation to anyone beyond the contract that they enter into (ToS etc...). [1] https://www.economicsdiscussion.net/economics-2/market-coordination-and-managerial-coordination/6095 https://www.economicsdiscussion.net/economics-2/market-coord...
• skanga 6y ago
  Has anybody here actually READ the first amendment? Nobody is blocking anyone's free speech. Facebook, Twitter, etc are PRIVATE property. They are legally ALLOWED to set terms of use on their property - whatever those terms may be. If anyone breaks those rules they can then be throw out! Trump, and company can peddling their LIES wherever it is allowed, like on FAUX news :-). His free speech STILL exists over there.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• condomhacker 6y ago
  They should have taken out twitter as Trump used Twitter to organize the protest. Taking out a platform not even directly involved in the incident is hilarious to me.
• throwaway9798 6y ago
  Going anonymous here for obvious reasons. FANGMULA holds tremendous power. No doubt about it. They can make or break any business very easily. This was known in theory and recently we saw this in practice. This doesn't mean that Parler cannot fight this out in court. They likely will. However, all SV companies have very deep pockets and can sustain a very lengthy legal challenge even if they're in the wrong. Small businesses just don't have that kind of cash to fight this out in court. Some (non-US observers) would say that the incoming administration and SV companies have stifled civil liberties and free speech. In the past, this was the exact reason that US sanctioned (or at the very least criticized) several countries when they would ban certain groups for inflaming racial tensions, spreading hate speech and radicalizing people. I am in no way a CCP supporter here but imagine if the CCP silenced a bunch of people because they did not agree with them, destroyed a platform where they gathered and then gloated about it, what would the US have to say? What would the world say? I don't have all the facts here. However, there are accusations that Facebook, Google both facilitated planning of the Capitol riots. There are no consequences for these companies - yet. Just because they "moderate" their platform does not make them better than Parler. More importantly, Facebook, Google, Apple, Twitter did not act while Trump supporters were actively spreading misinformation and lies. Trump has been indiscriminately lying and inflaming racial tensions for a long time on Twitter. Why wasn't he suspended before? Lots of Facebook groups, YouTube channel spread lies about many topics, why weren't they removed earlier? These companies were emboldened when they saw that Trump is leaving office. They are acting opportunistically to drum up the new cycle. I could be totally wrong about this, but its a personal feeling. It felt like a feeding frenzy starting with Twitter suspending Trump's handle and eventually banning his account permanently. Other companies had to jump in otherwise they would look weak and complicit. I think Parler should've given a longer notice period to resolve whatever issues they had with moderation. 24 hours is very little notice for anybody to do anything meaningful. Finally, I am shocked that not a single "civil liberties" supporter came out and criticized these tech companies for being Judges, Juries and Executioners. These companies need to be treated like utilities because they are. They need to be regulated as such. The amount of monopolistic power that they have shown is unbelievable. During the US-China trade war, China realized its dependence on US chips and software. The US government could effectively cripple Chinese companies. This was disconcerting in itself as there aren't effective alternatives for many tech related hardware and software. However, the show of power post Jan 8th by these tech companies was several orders of magnitude worse than the trade war. Europe, Asia and rest of the world are watching and should take note of this event and build their own local competitors otherwise, SV and the US government can effectively control the whole world.
• kwdc 6y ago
  Destroying Parler sets a bad precedent. Who's next? As people cheer for Parler's destruction, consider what happens if the pendulum swings the other way. This isn't even necessarily a free speech issue. Editorial control implies a lot. All that the valley has done is demonstrate quite clearly they are now too powerful and need tighter regulation. Protections can now be removed. This wasn't a great idea. But it likely felt good.
  • kwdc 6y ago
    First they came... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_...
• bww 6y ago
  When it comes to baking cakes for gay weddings or offering birth control in health insurance plans the far-right considers the discretion of a business to determine how it is run inviolable. When it’s their own interests at stake for the same reason, suddenly it’s unconscionable that a private company should exercise such unilateral control. Funny how that works.
• chrononaut 6y ago
  > So much of this liberal support for the attempted destruction of Parler is based in utter ignorance about that platform, and about basic principles of free speech. I’d be very surprised if more than a tiny fraction of liberals cheering Parler’s removal from the internet have ever used the platform or know anything about it other than the snippets they have been shown by those seeking to justify its destruction and to depict it as some neo-Nazi stronghold. This is a serious question: Was there a bastion of nuanced discussion and debate occurring on Parler? Almost everything I've ever seen has been amplification of disinformation. I am sure some nuanced discussions were there, but Glenn it making it seem like it was a minor part of the service or perhaps mirrored how common it might be on Twitter and other platforms? Is that what he's trying to imply?
• newbie789 6y ago
  I was never a Parler user since I’m not a big fan of social media in general. Also, I’m not a mobile app developer/administrator so forgive me if I sound ignorant. I’ve only read a few bits and pieces so I have a few questions. 1. Does getting booted off AWS actually mean the end of the service? Somebody sent me some quote about how the software was built to run on bare metal servers, so are they having difficulty getting servers at OVH/Linode/DO/whatever? I know that Amazon is HUGE but it’d be a trip (and HIGHLY worrisome) if they actually dictate who gets to be on the internet as a whole. 2. Again, never dealt with apps. I’ve 100% always dealt with clients using websites, packaged software, email, phone calls etc. Is user behavior and/or mobile browser design such that having a mobile-friendly interface (like mobile.twitter.com) that’s entirely under Parker’s control an untenable way to run the service? Maybe I’m just old but I’ve grown up as a huge fan of bookmarks and still make heavy use of them today, even on mobile. I don’t install almost anything on my phone unless the app is a huge value add like VR/AR stuff or the Audubon bird guide that I can use offline. I suppose my overall question is: Is this irreparable? If so, that’s pretty terrifying.
• seastonATccs 6y ago
  Just another confused person wondering why they just don't own their entire stack? If you ain't a rose don't plant yourself in a garden.
• chmod600 6y ago
  We just saw the awesome power of Big Tech go from "theoretical" to "wow, they actually did it". The reasons are not as important as the fact that it happened. Power doesn't truly exist until it's exercised, because you don't really know how things will play out. Now we do know how it plays out: exactly like we feared. An unsypathetic "victim" to experiment on with their overwhelming strength. Now it's just a matter of who is next and when. It's OK, that victim might be evil also.
• GoldenMonkey 6y ago
  Once again, if you have alternate beliefs. You are banned from the public square. Free speech is dead in America. The only speech allowed, is the one the left allows. Long live fascism. Prove me wrong.
• uih3223JIU 6y ago
  It's time for red states to create their own country and the rest of the US should be renamed to something like Censored States of America (CSU).
  • vital_beach 6y ago
    How would you define that, though? Popular vote, number of reps, number of senators, governors? There's no clean break. Edit just to point out this is a bad idea
  • w0de 6y ago
    "There are more Trump voters in California than Texas, more Biden voters in Texas than New York, more Trump voters in New York than Ohio, more Biden voters in Ohio than Massachusetts, more Trump voters in Massachusetts than Mississippi, and more Biden voters in Mississippi than Vermont." [https://xkcd.com/2399/ https://xkcd.com/2399/]
• cosmiccatnap 6y ago
  xkcd.com/1357/
• vital_beach 6y ago
  Redline the hell out of your contract or follow the standard "Don't be a problem for us" rules. It's really not that hard.
• mabedan 6y ago
  > That is because three Silicon Valley monopolies — Amazon, Google and Apple — abruptly united to remove Parler from the internet, exactly at the moment when it became the most-downloaded app in the country It became the most downloaded app _because_ Apple gave them the 1 day ultimatum to start moderating their content. Only then more people heard of the app and downloaded it before it’s off the store.
• kraf 6y ago
  Looks like there is already a replacement for Parler: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/how-silicon-valley-in-a-show- https://greenwald.substack.com/p/how-silicon-valley-in-a-sho... of-monopolistic/comments
• MrMan 6y ago
  Didn’t Parler find a new host?
• MrMan 6y ago
  Parler is now on a different host, so maybe not completely destroyed
• crx07 6y ago
  hOW sILICON vALLEY gave rise to Parler by talking about it until everyone knew the name of some obscure app for racists
• dragonwriter 6y ago
  > Indeed, a Parler executive told me that of the thirteen people arrested as of Monday for the breach at the Capitol, none appear to be active users of Parler. Presumably, this was of the first 13 people to be charged in US District Court (when about 40 others were charged in D.C. Superior Court). And maybe it's true of those 13, though “a Parler executive told me...none appear” seems to be below the threshold of factual information that a responsible journalist would rest any conclusion on besides “that’s what Parler is advancing as a PR position”. But clearly there were plenty of people there with active Parler accounts, even if they haven't yet been arrested: https://projects.propublica.org/parler-capitol-videos/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social#1042617 https://projects.propublica.org/parler-capitol-videos/?utm_s...