32 ms·

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 t

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.
- dahfizz 6y ago
  > This isn't some theoretical case of billionaires imposing their worldviews by banning people that we should be tremendously fearful of. I think you've missed the point. The concern OP raises is that this is no longer theoretical - these few billionaires actually can impose their worldview by controlling speech. In this case, we can all agree that Parler had to go. But the precedent / principle of the issue can be considered separately. > They're not deciding what is acceptable speech. They're deciding what is acceptable speech for their platforms and services. This is a distinction without a difference. If the major platforms all ban you, you are silenced. Its time we recognize the power these platforms have.
  - big_curses 6y ago
    > This is a distinction without a difference. I disagree, there is an extreme difference there. Freedom of speech is specifically in regards to the government giving you the negative right of being able to say whatever you want without government prosecution (aside from some edge cases like direct threats and the like, which are closer to actual violence). What they do not do is guarantee you a platform. You are free to say whatever you like, but you are not owed the right to be listened to. Removing someone from a platform is not silencing them. A private company does not owe you anything, let alone service.
    - robertlagrant 6y ago
      No. The first amendment is about the government. The concept of freedom of speech is broader. If in a pandemic I can only legally communicate via digital tools, and the billionaires running the digital tools all decide to ban me, I am silenced.
      - 8note 6y ago
        It is not true that you can only legally communicate via digital tools. The US still has a post office
erdeszt 6y ago
I kind of feel the same as you. I'm happy that Parler is gone but on the other hand I think that Google, Facebook, Amazon and Twitter are monopolies and should be broken up.
- Grimm1 6y ago
  I agree. I see a lot of people pushing to give them special status or make them town squares and I think that is the exact opposite solution we need. We should take anti-monopoly action and foster competition in their respective markets instead.
- sidr 6y ago
  These are 4 different companies that compete with each other (Google Cloud vs. AWS and Facebook vs. Twitter, also although you didn't list it Apple vs. Google) in the spaces relevant to this conversation (cloud services, social media, and phone apps). One can always list all the players in an industry and call that set "a monopoly and should be broken up". Or we can just take this for what it is, which is that some entity is so toxic that none of these companies (which compete with each other otherwise) want to touch it.
  - erdeszt 6y ago
    Google has monopoly on search, Amazon on online retail and to a lesser extent cloud hosting, Facebook on social media. Twitter on 140 character word dumps so that's maybe not at the same level bad as the others. Edit: Apple doesn't really have a monopoly on anything.
- JohnBooty 6y ago
  Google, Facebook, Amazon and Twitter are monopolies and should be broken up. Dominant market share != monopoly For a monopoly, you need anticompetitive practices. Is Facebook unfairly preventing the success of other social networks? A good example of a monopoly was 90's era Microsoft, which prevented its OEMs from shipping competing operating systems. Terminology aside, I completely agree with you that we need far, far more choice in the marketplace.
helen___keller 6y ago
I don't think there's an easy answer. 2 possible solutions: (1) deplatforming could be either a democratic process, or be challengeable through some kind of democratic process. (2) deplatforming could be at the sole discretion of platforms, but the platforms themselves need to use open standards and protocols such that it is sufficiently easy for those who were deplatformed to switch to the opposition or self-platform (for example: ios allowing competing app stores). This would be difficult and technically challenging to enact in many situations (what does it mean in the case of social networks for example?), And if there's no competition we need antitrust ASAP If all the competition are also deplatforming you, I think at a certain point it becomes fair to say that you were more or less democratically rejected, much like if every bar in town kicks out neo-nazis that's not a failure of free speech but a success of the free market. But that relies on a large, healthy, robust competitive ecosystem which does not exist in a billionaire-dominated tech scene.
- weeboid 6y ago
  > (1) deplatforming could be either a democratic process, or be challengeable through some kind of democratic process. Think gay wedding cakes > (2) ... but the platforms themselves need to use open standards and protocols Open standards and protocols like `https` and HTML?
- kirghiz 6y ago
  A form of ostracism, you mean? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostracism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostracism
mattbee 6y ago
> 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? No, because you don't need AWS or Twitter or Cloudflare or any of the name tech companies to run a high-traffic web site successfully.
- zhobbs 6y ago
  You need an ISP right? You think telecom companies are anxious to provide them bandwidth?
  - evgen 6y ago
    Telecom companies are common carriers and do not have the luxury of being able to deny customers access if they are not breaking the law. Nothing preventing these people from starting up their own ISP and hosting company.
    - uberduper 6y ago
      Nothing stopping them from fabricating their own silicon too, right? How far down this hole till we reach the bottom? I wonder if this was the same sort of argument used to justify denying minorities homes / home loans? "Well they're free to build their own house!" "Well they're free to cut their own lumber!" "Well they're free to forge their own hammers!" "Well they're free to..."
      - minkzilla 6y ago
        Thank you for this example. I’ll be using it. I’ve been struggling to articulate that just because technically someone is free to do something doesn’t mean they aren’t being meaningfully hindered from doing it.
      - filoeleven 6y ago
        Denying people homes or loans because of race is vastly different, because one’s race is an inherited physical characteristic.[1] Here, companies are denying service to Parler based on the beliefs (edit: and behavior) of its users. This situation lies somewhere between “refusing service based on someone’s religion” and “refusing service because I just don’t like them.” Political affiliation is not yet recognized as a religious belief, so they are not a protected class. I don’t know enough about the law to say on what grounds a company stands if they drop/refuse service because they think someone is being a dick. [1] it’s more nuanced than that of course, but I’m speaking broadly here
kevwil 6y ago
Gonna disagree there a bit, semantically. Parler was a no-censorship social site, open to everyone. Extreme right-wing people flocked to it while very few people with other perspectives did. Parler being a hate site was not purely of their making, but rather a result of society's bias toward silencing opposing views. We need more people like Daryl Davis (a black jass musician who has converted hundreds of KKK members through kindness and friendship and music) so that censorship seems less and less like a good idea. I'm not surprised at the end result, but the effort to retain free speech was a valiant one. Forcing extremist views underground doesn't silence them, it emboldens them and makes it harder to know what they're up to. Not a good idea.
- MrMan 6y ago
  "society's bias toward silencing opposing views." censorship is NOT the underlying problem here
- ForHackernews 6y ago
  I don't think this is exactly true, according to other seemingly well-informed comments on this site, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25731121 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25731121 Parler was moderated, and it was explicitly moderated for coherence with a right-wing/reactionary viewpoint. It was not a neutral, unfiltered platform.
- Miner49er 6y ago
  > Parler was a no-censorship social site, open to everyone. This is just false. They censored all kinds of things: antifa, parody accounts, obscene usernames, porn, etc. 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...
MrMan 6y ago
Libertarianism == billionaires subbing in for government. this is what we get
- dahfizz 6y ago
  Are you implying our government, which spends $6.6 trillion a year and jails people for smoking weed, is libertarian in nature?
  - kingaillas 6y ago
    I think your statement is the reverse of what was implied. Doesn't libertarianism posit a weak central government, shedding all responsibilities (that can be shed) to the free market, where competition ensures the best outcomes, choices for all, etc? If that's true, the current situation of wealthy corporations controlling various social media platforms is... the desired outcome? The fact that competition is better in areas such as motor vehicles, due to physical standards like roads that work for everyone, lack of network effects, and so on, is beside the point. It isn't the government's fault that Orkut and MySpace didn't compete well against Facebook, or that Parler entered a service contract with another corporation that decided their TOS was violated. This will all be sorted out in the courts, interpreting contracts which are the ultimate source of truth in the libertarian world view. Fear nothing, justice will prevail. If Parler was not in violation of the contract, they will be compensated. If they were, too bad, they failed to adhere to the contract they agreed to. They deserve to fail and the NEXT competitor to take up the mantle will have incrementally better information and chances to succeed.
    - dahfizz 6y ago
      That's like saying "Humans produce carbon dioxide, cars produce carbon dioxide, lets study human anatomy to learn how cars work". OP's statement of "this is what we get" strongly implies that the current state of things is somehow the result of libertarian policies. There is nothing libertarian about our government. That's why I bring up the extremely high spending and unjust laws we have. Blaming libertarianism for anything happening in the world requires some serious mental gymnastics. China also has large corporations, should we blame libertarianism for all the human rights offences happening there?
arethuza 6y ago
"do we really want a handful of unelected billionaires deciding what is acceptable speech" That's pretty much been newspapers in the UK for as long as I can remember!
- Synaesthesia 6y ago
  Yes but the solution is not to now hand them more power.
  - vehementi 6y ago
    More, or less? It's easier than ever to DIY a site on your own infrastructure and be reachable by everyone in the world
    - guerrilla 6y ago
      Can you DIY your own domain registrar and payment processor though?
    - CrazyPyroLinux 6y ago
      Until they coordinate to shut you down...
- amanaplanacanal 6y ago
  I’m in the US, and old enough to remember the time before the Internet, and that’s what I remember. You had three or so TV networks and a handful of national magazines and newspapers. Big tech isn’t really any different from the media zeitgeist I grew up with. It’s just the last 20 years or so of everybody having a megaphone that is outside the norm.
  - Zambyte 6y ago
    It is very different. Everyone saw the same or very similar information on the TV. People watching the same channels would see the exact same thing. With social media, your feed is perfectly catered to you as an individual, by using as much data on you as they can get their hands on, and a nearly endless supply of content from the "megaphones" of other users. Even if you have many of the same friends as someone, and politically align with them, you probably would find scrolling through their feed to be less interesting than scrolling through your own.
cmsonger 6y ago
> 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? I think it's fine to be concerned about the principle while in agreement on this use. Both things can be true. And FWIW, that's the state in which I find myself. The president used Twitter to promote lies about the election that were consumed by his followers who then used social media to plan and execute violence in the US capitol. When that same cycle threatened to repeat, these companies stepped in. Good for them, what was their other choice? But appropriate action in this case does not mean that the process and standards used are OK in the arbitrary case and completely agree that lack of legislative standards is the problem. The tech companies had not good choices here because as a society we've not yet set any reasonable rules.
- ruined 6y ago
  This same power has been used, on a less dramatic scale over the past year and for a long time before now, to attack police reform activists and disrupt organizing of the local activist communities that exist to oppose this shit on the ground. It's not really a situation of "this may be socially chilling", it's been happening, and now it's just the first time they contravened the president and made the news cycle. I don't really see any other decision they could have made this past week. But if social media and capital in general would stop kneecapping every political option but ineffective liberalism and dogwhistle fascism, maybe the large numbers of people who are angry and feel helpless would currently have a pressure valve in a healthier direction. Three or four massive companies with incentives to suppress the slightest disruption to profit, that hold unprecedented surveillance power, and exercise detailed control over individual and mass communication, that make apparently ideological decisions about who is allowed to exist online, are not compatible with a healthy society or any path that could lead us out of this situation.
  - creato 6y ago
    "Opposing this shit on the ground" is why we're in this nightmare in the first place. Imagine if there had been counterprotestors "opposing this shit on the ground" at the Capitol insurrection: we'd probably be pretty fucking close to a civil war right now instead of near universal condemnation of the extremist forces. If you have anything to do with "opposing this shit on the ground", please fucking stop. You are accomplishing less than nothing.
indigochill 6y ago
> 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? I think this question conflates "private company exercises right to refuse service" and "private company decides what's acceptable speech". The internet is not truly centralized and no tech giant has a monopoly on speech. There remains plenty of internet real estate to host ideas on that's not owned by tech giants. I think it should remain the right of these companies not to do business with organizations they choose not to and that said organization should also have the right to find another provider who will do business with them (or create their own if need be). Is this not basically the same as porn hosting? There are hosts who don't want to be associated with it, and there are hosts who have no qualms taking porn money.
- cm2187 6y ago
  Google and Apple have a duopoly on mobile platforms, which are the natural place for any communication app. If those two act in concert you are facing a monopoly. There are only two ways out. Competition or regulation. For AWS, I agree there are many alternatives, and in fact what shocked me wasn’t so much that they terminated their contract with Parler, but the fact that they seem to have done so with zero notice period. Which I find extremely cavalier.
  - iaHN 6y ago
    Regulatory capture prevents competition. Money influencing politics prevents regulation.
    - freeone3000 6y ago
      What regulation prohibits you from making a phone OS, even for an existing phone? Or your own android build? Or your own store on Android?
    - cm2187 6y ago
      Up to a certain point. No amount of money would prevent congress from toughening bank regulations after the financial crisis. I also doubt that the republicans are going to give big tech companies a pass when they come back to power.
deeeeplearning 6y ago
No one cried like this when Stormfront was taken down. These "Libertarian" Ayn Rand type morons just dressed up the white supremacy in a hipster tie and beard and suddenly its all about free speech.
- whateveracct 6y ago
  seriously - Parler just slapped some SV branding on it all, and now they get to tap into the average HNer's contrarianism to garner their support.
Moodles 6y ago
> On one hand, Parler was a hate site, filled with conspiracy theories, radicalization and racism. This is a question in good faith. Can you provide any evidence at all that Parler had more “hate” than Twitter, etc.?
- eximius 6y ago
  1. Probably. Take a look at some of the Parker dumps before it was shut down. Calls for death squads weren't couched in metaphor. 2. Even if not, Twitter, as much as I loathe it, also has many non-hateful users. Parler was a haven for alt-right extremism.
  - dionidium 6y ago
    Anybody who has ever talked about housing on Twitter or Facebook knows that pictures of Mao and guillotines frequently accompany calls to kill all landlords (just to take one example I'm familiar with). Are these legitimate calls to violence? Or just jokey memes? Is there a difference? Who decides that? In what sense do these posts not demonstrate support for political violence?
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - dageshi 6y ago
      In the case of Parler, it turned out that yes, the calls to violence were real and not jokes. You might say all these platforms previously gave Parler the benefit of the doubt and then were faced with incontrovertible evidence that Parler was facilitating political violence.
    - xref 6y ago
      Replace “landlords” with “black people” and ask the same questions. Report the posts.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
grumple 6y ago
How is this different from any other moderation? Nobody would bat an eye if you were banned from HN or reddit for hate speech. Why should a platform be any different? If my customer started using my services to spread Nazism, I'd ban them too. Let's say I was a baker - would it be reasonable that I be compelled to draw swastikas on cakes? Obviously, that's absurd! It is equally absurd to demand that other businesses provide platforms for behavior they don't condone. Freedom of speech is freedom from oppression by government. Parler isn't being oppressed, they just aren't being given a platform to oppress others by private citizens and corporations. Well, not anymore, although lots of corps made some money from them while they could.
- tannedNerd 6y ago
  I think the issue is that the town square that the first is supposed to protect doesn’t exist anymore. The town square is now Twitter, and valid or not, the de-platforming of a lot of conservatives is going to have a lasting backlash against tech companies. I wouldn’t be surprised to see GOP resurgence in 2022, along with another very real attack on section 230.
  - dleslie 6y ago
    With the town square metaphor: while you cannot be prosecuted for what you say in the square, you can be persecuted by your civilian peers; folks may stop speaking to you, or begin informing others of your nature. Twitter et al booting persons from their services is the neighbour slamming their door in your face, or the baker refusing to do business with you. The town square is tcp/ip, not the services on top of it.
  - mullen 6y ago
    Twitter is not the town square since real town squares are owned by the State. They are public spaces for all and, let me point out, that you usually need a permit to speak or have a rally. So they are not that free as everyone thinks. Twitter is more like a mall owned by a large corporation and while there is some trouble there, they will kick people off the property that are too offensive. If you try to start an insurrection at a mall, you will be kicked out and banned. It is in Twitters and mall owners best interest to start insurrections on their properties because there will be ramifications for allowing that to happen, that is not good for business.
artificialLimbs 6y ago
Freedom of speech doesn't aim to protect speech that is 'nice'.
- evgen 6y ago
  Freedom of speech aims to protect speech from government suppression, not from societal norms or the consequences of that speech in the marketplace.
  - zajio1am 6y ago
    The pivotal book about freedom of speech, 'On Liberty' from J. S. Mill, is predominantly interested in freedom from societal suppression, not just government suppression: "Like other tyrannies, the tyranny of the majority was at first, and is still vulgarly, held in dread, chiefly as operating through the acts of the public authorities. But reflecting persons perceived that when society is itself the tyrant - society collectively, over the separate individuals who compose it - its means of tyrannising are not restricted to the acts which it may do by the hands of its political functionaries. Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough: there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development, and, if possible, prevent the formation, of any individuality not in harmony with its ways, and compel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own."
    - gamblor956 6y ago
      This book had no bearing on the First Amendment's conception of freedom of speech, seeing as how it was written several decades after the formation of the U.S. This book may have been pivotal to British utilitarianists, but it didn't have much, if any, impact on the U.S.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
ball_of_lint 6y ago
This is exactly the point that the article misses. It's not contradictory to hold the views that "This was the right decision" and "This decision shouldn't have been up to private companies". While there are significant improvements that could be made to our laws, the most significant failure here is one of enforcement. When Republican senators chose not to hear witnesses during the impeachment trial they took a significant step towards making Donald Trump a despot and legitimizing the alt-right. The recent strife is a direct consequence.
- robertlagrant 6y ago
  Come on. People keep citing "key events" that led to this. It's silly. The rioters would've not rioted if more witnesses had been heard? You think they even are aware of the trial proceedings?
  - MajorBee 6y ago
    If these witnesses were presented and heard, leading to (long shot maybe, but still) a conviction by the Senate of Trump, of course, things would have been very different today. You can argue that the violent events of last week would have simply taken place early last year, but at least it might not have threatened peaceful transfer of power after the elections.
gamblor956 6y ago
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? That has always been the history of media, see Hearst, Murdoch, Mercer, etc. The democracy of the early Internet was the exception from billionaires being in charge, not the norm. Hearst used to be the voice of print media for decades. The situation in radio is the same as it is on the internet: a few publicly-owned companies own a supermajority of the FM airwaves. If you wonder why you can change the station and hear the same song simultaneously on 5 different stations, it's because they're all owned by the same company. In TV, for most of the past 2 decades, conservative billionaires have owned more than 75% of the public TV stations in the U.S. and Australia, and have been using that bully pulpit on behalf of conservatives during that time. Murdoch especially was instrumental in providing Trump (and other extremist candidates like Cruz) thousands of hours of free coverage during the 2016 campaign. The ownership groups would regularly interfere with local media and demand they either air or avoid topics as directed by ownership. Where was conservative outrage over billionaires deciding speech during this time?
- 1123581321 6y ago
  I think one difference is that people inhabit and create social media in a way that they didn't with print and TV. A significant percentage of our lives is spent in these de factor public squares. As a media company that 'creates' tweets to be displayed on CNN, etc., or read by logged out users, the analogy to traditional media is more straightforward.
dboreham 6y ago
As opposed to billionaires like Rupert Murdoch?
zarkov99 6y ago
How was it different from Facebook? Plenty of hate there, for months, why aren't they shutdown? Just listen to the Parler executives account of what happened. Contrary to all the nonsense being spewed by ideologues, Parler did have a moderation policy that prohibited incitement to violence, and they did enforce it, but it was neither perfect nor instantaneous (since, by deliberate choice, only humans were involved). They also complied to the requests from the three tech titans, but of course that did not matter, their fate was sealed before the first letter was sent. This is a moment of astonishing hypocrisy and terrible abuse of power. Silicon Valley has proven to half of America that the system is rigged beyond recourse, and for a number of those Americans that might be the straw that breaks the camels back, leading them into radicalization and terrorism. It would be very wise for all of us in tech, in any position of influence, to urge calm and dialogue and to provide space for all speech that is not urging violence. We are not children to throw away our country because of a single deranged fool. We need to show to the country that tech is not an instrument available to only those of a certain ideological bent and that we can talk and sort out our differences without violence or repression.
- colinmhayes 6y ago
  Parler was created to be a place where the alt-right could freely spout their lies without fear of censorship. Facebook has that, but it's not the reason the platform exists. The intent is completely different.
  - zarkov99 6y ago
    And who is it that decides what is Parler's intent and allots the corresponding thought-crime punishment? I am sorry but your point is absurd.
    - sbarre 6y ago
      People digging into Parler found out that all new users were shadowbanned by default until a group of like-minded moderators reviewed and approved their posts. These moderators were overwhelmingly MAGA/Trump supporters, so I'm sure you can guess what kind of posts they expected to see before they unblocked a new user. This was all shared/revealed on Twitter, so take it as "evidence" with whatever grain of salt you like, but people didn't just make up these claims about what Parler was.. So while perhaps Parler claimed to be a place for open debate and unrestricted ideas, it is seems that was just a thin cover for their much more focused goal of being a home for all this extremist right-wing talk in America.
Grustaf 6y ago
Isn’t the solution pretty simple? Make platforms choose, either only remove illegal material, or be regulated as a publisher. Would take care of calls to violence and freedom of speech.
- exporectomy 6y ago
  Would also put a huge burden on small businesses. I run a little forum for by business. I want to remove spam and off-topic posts, so I'll be classed as a publisher, but I don't want to be subject to restrictions of "Publishers may be held liable for omissions, mistakes, and transgressions of their authors". What if a user quotes somebody else's words but doesn't use proper quotation marks? My problem!
  - Grustaf 6y ago
    Well, marking posts as spam or off-topic isn’t the same thing as blocking someone though, so there should be a middle ground. And in any case, it seems pretty straightforward to forbid platforms from banning PEOPLE, it should only be possible to ban utterances. At the very least, Trump should have a legal right to be unbanned as long as he doesn’t post things that Twitter doesn’t allow.
jquery 6y ago
I’ve been using Parler since June to discuss fairly mainstream views and talk about day to day life on a Twitter alternative. This week that option was taken away from me, without due process for me or the company in question. The alleged violations were nothing I hadn’t seen on Twitter, except Twitter regularly hosts even worse content, but I guess it has enough important people using it to crush alternatives on shaky claims and spotty evidence.
threatofrain 6y ago
We should really be talking about Ron Paul because as a test plaintiff Parker is awful. Per their CEO, law firms, banks and payment providers, mail and texting services have also cancelled on them. By that point, what would having your own tech stack do? How do you even collect revenue when banks and payment providers cancel on you? This is the power of freedom of association at work, the power behind cancellation.
- CrazyPyroLinux 6y ago
  Indeed - Ron Paul is not so much the "canary in the coalmine" - this is the whole mining crew succumbing to the toxic fumes! Even for people who don't agree with his libertarian politics, there's no arguing that he is anything short of an uncommonly decent man. He's certainly the closest I've ever seen anyone come to being the mythical "honest politician." So of course they're attacking him...
  - trianglem 6y ago
    What? He wrote a whole bunch of extremely racist op-eds about how black people are inferior and slavery was a boon to them. Your post is a lot of dissembling nonsense.
    - CrazyPyroLinux 6y ago
      That seems unlikely. Do you have links to any reliable primary sources, if they haven't been conveniently censored? I have a hunch that any "extremely racist" comments may have been more to the effect that although slavery was very bad indeed, there might have been better ways to dismantle it than by half the country fighting the other half [0], which is a sentiment worth considering in the context of current events. [0] https://www.lewrockwell.com/2007/12/bob-murphy/ron-paul-and-the-economics-of-slavery/ https://www.lewrockwell.com/2007/12/bob-murphy/ron-paul-and-...
hn_asker 6y ago
You as the consumer accepted the terms of service of the hosting site. So don't be surprised when things like this happen once you've violated the terms of service.
- bordercases 6y ago
  This will push towards a balkanization of the Internet at the platform level as people will want to self-determine the terms of service for the basis of their communication. Second boom spurred by corporate hubris. You might think there's nothing wrong with this hubris, depending on how comfy your pockets are when lined with their money. The grand majority of the world will not agree – they are not paid by them, when they are they are not treated fairly, and if they are treated fairly they are likely within a sociological bubble.
  - JohnBooty 6y ago
    This will push towards a balkanization of the Internet at the platform level as people will want to self-determine the terms of service for the basis of their communication. This seems like a good outcome. Rather than arguing about whether or not Facebook and Twitter should allow various kinds of content, folks can choose the sorts of spaces to which they'd rather belong. And it's not like you have to pick one and only one. It just seems like a non-problem. My feeling is that most people would not like to belong to a space where open racism and other abhorrent views are tolerated and encouraged. Those that do can have their fringe spaces, but they shouldn't expect mainstream companies to help them do so.
    - bordercases 6y ago
      At the level of speech, yes I agree with you. It becomes a problem when these commercial platforms meddle with government business and the social contract. Things everyone is supposed to have and equally. This means access to fundamental goods and services – health, banking, food and water, employment, emancipation, etc. Software only gets to eat the world if it involves itself in every industry and aspect of life, end to end. And no one makes money in startups unless you are a unicorn (unlikely) or acquired by a large existing player (more likely). Where does this go in a post-COVID recovery with 60% unemployment and the destruction of small business? I never thought I would say this, but I have become a fan of Europe's approach to regulation. They've pushed for GDPR which at least gets us the ability to obtain and delete our data, they've acknowledged the right to repair, and as self-serving as it may be, they understand the ramifications of a unilateral takedown of the communications of a head of state – particularly the precedent it sets. They will likely continue their fight until they've setup their own alternatives to SV-based infrastructure.
Cabal 6y ago
> Parler was a hate site, filled with conspiracy theories, radicalization and racism Citation needed. Neither I nor my friends or acquaintances used it for any of these things. Hell, I've hired people off of Parler.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
Grimm1 6y ago
Parler may sue to have their site reinstated, which they are, I don't see an issue here. If these companies were wrong to take them down the courts will force these companies to reverse it. I don't think they will though because multiple posts, comments etc on Parler apparently match the criteria for incitement which Parler insufficiently moderated and is not covered by 1st Amendment rights.
agloeregrets 6y ago
> 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? I find it ironic that the ban is what makes people think the techCos are controlling society rather than the fact that all actions of social networks and hosting services impact society. Like the time when FB make some news feeds more negative to track impact and engagement. Or how the radicalization of users on FB can happen due to the Algo. Ultimately this is a legislative failure, but it also is how a free market should defend itself of dangerous content as well. (keep in mind a Civil war 2 isn't exactly great for the economy). What is wild is that the laws for this all exist and are in use. The behavior here is the use of Section 230 as designed. The definition of insurrection and hate speech are all defined. Clearly what has happened is actually late action by social platforms rather than overreach as the US Gov lacks any mode to actually take on this content.
bigmattystyles 6y ago
I'm in the same boat as you - I'm glad parler is gone but I go back and forth on the implications of the ability of a few to silence so many - the most reasonable way I've come to think of it is if David Duke (huge racist scumbag) suddenly wanted to go on CNN and speak for an hour once a week - should CNN let him? You wouldn't think twice about it, you'd likely think - why would CNN have to comply? It's not a perfect analogy, but that's the best way I've been able to think of it. In the end, it's lose-lose for non fascists. While we're all debating whether there was overreach and or if it should be mitigated, actual fascists are regrouping and planning their next assault.
- GcVmvNhBsU 6y ago
  Are they actually being silenced, as in someone is forcing them to not express their thoughts? Can they not congregate together the old fashioned way and have as much free speech as they want?
grahamburger 6y ago
> in an ideal world, we have laws applied even handedly to deal with this We have laws protecting people from discrimination based on race, sexuality, etc. A grocery store can't refuse to serve people by race. Maybe we should expand these protected classes and make sure they apply to Internet businesses as well. I don't think we will (or should) expand them in such a way that Parler would be included, though.
briandear 6y ago
> Parler was a hate site, filled with conspiracy theories, radicalization and racism And so is Facebook. And Twitter. And YouTube. And so what? If you don’t like that stuff, you are free to not use services that you don’t like.
newacct583 6y ago
> On the other hand, do we really want a handful of unelected billionaires deciding what is acceptable speech Yes? I mean, look where you're posting. HN is very heavily moderated. Check out dang's post history for all the work he has to do. HN has very clear ideas on what speech is "acceptable" and what is not, and they are significantly more complicated than the "don't incite political violence" standard being enforced against Parler. I mean, really. Parler failed to clear even the simplest, most straightforward, most consensus- and norm-driven ideals of how public discourse is supposed to work. And they didn't really get "moderated" any harder than any of us would have. Yet we still have to rally behind them as the standard-bearer for megacorp censorship? Really? Can't we wait for at least a tiny bit of evidence that they're misusing their power first?
Covzire 6y ago
Parler wasn't a hate site. You're parroting far left propaganda.
- amanaplanacanal 6y ago
  If you don’t moderate that stuff you are going to be tarred by association. I don’t know how you could avoid that.
- vladTheInhaler 6y ago
  Comments that are acceptable on Parler: "Personally I'm hoping for war I'd love to crush leftist skulls and rip out their spines. Rally your soy boys. Your Pantifa and BLM wannabe gangsters. I'll bath myself is leftist blood and drink from your skullcaps." Comments that are unacceptable on Parler: Pretending to be a cow owned by Devin Nunes
  - charly187 6y ago
    What makes you think the former is acceptable on Parler? Are there documented cases where something like that was reported and Parler refused to take it down?
    - vladTheInhaler 6y ago
      You can go ahead and look at any of the 98 examples cited in Amazon's letter to Parler.
      - baobabKoodaa 6y ago
        Didn't Parler remove all of those posts?
- throwaway19937 6y ago
  Here's a comment with a racial slur on Parler with 25k upvotes. https://www.reddit.com/r/ParlerWatch/comments/ktwmje/this_is_the_type_of_free_speech_parler_accepts/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ParlerWatch/comments/ktwmje/this_is... IMO it's reasonable to consider it a hate site or a site which embraces racist behavior.
dnh44 6y ago
When it comes to issues like these I tend to agree with the sentiment of "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." But this isn't about criminalising speech promoting conspiracy theories, radicalisation, and racism. It's about private entities withdrawing the infrastructure of speech, which obviously gets a lot more complicated to reason about and legislate. I'm mostly okay with Apple and Google removing the app from their stores. I'm slightly less okay with Amazon withdrawing their services. But if Parler ends up reborn on a server running out of someones house or business I would be very much against their utility providers cutting off access. So I guess what I'm saying is that I'm with you and don't quite know what to think about this either. However I do worry that if we're not careful as a society someone posting on HN (or maybe a government approved Facebook group) will eventually say: >The internet 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.
- esyir 6y ago
  Let's put it a different way then. Imagine right wing dystopia where everything you value is considered bad. Now you try to discuss Gay rights. You can't talk about it on Facebook, nor on any platform, as they ban you instantly. You build your own platform. Aws/gcp/azure ban you there too and kill the whole thing. I'm going to go the next step. Now credit cards and other payment services refuse services as well. Are you supposed to rebuild the entire tech ecosystem that the entire world runs on? Fight through every damn moat along the way? Is this the bar we set here? Its easy to talk free speech for popular speech. It's how people react to unpopular speech that shows their true colours.
  - ip26 6y ago
    The 1st means you can't be jailed by the government for discussing gay rights. It doesn't mean private individuals have to humor you. It doesn't even mean they have to listen to you.
    - zaroth 6y ago
      There are other laws than the 1st Amendment that come into play here. The 3 biggest technology companies in the world united in the last two days to shut down an upstart competitor who was, at the time, literally the #1 app on iPhone and Android. So the issue is primarily one of anti-trust laws. Monopolies do not get to arbitrarily and selectively enforce their ToS against competitors; that is an illegal abuse of market power. The tech giants this week seem to have demonstrated that they do in fact hold monopoly power in the market, and are willing to use it to crush a potential competitor. This seems to me to be an unprecedented situation, a likely anti-trust violation, and potentially to the extent that it was a coordinated action by these companies, a violation of RICO statutes. I think it is fair to say that Parler, like every social network, could be used to post hateful messages, or messages advocating violence. GP stated that Parler was a “hate site” but I think it’s more accurate to say that Parler was a site that carried some hateful messages. It was by no means a site formed or designed specifically to carry hate. A corollary that I would raise is a similar standard in copyright infringement. Sites which are designed specifically with the intent of committing copyright infringement are now criminally liable — it has recently become a serious felony to make these kinds of sites. However, site that show a significant non-infringement purpose are not illegal, even if some infringement takes place on their platform. You might recall that YouTube was a site that got its start with rampant copyright infringement, and to this day has a significant amount of infringing material on its servers, but it is not criminally liable, or even civilly liable for that content due to the fact that the site has a significant non-infringement purpose. I think that’s a fair analogy with Parler. If there’s a copyright or public safety issue with a piece of content posted on a social media platform, the law should provide for a takedown procedure against the content, not against the whole platform. The cause of action should be against the poster, not against the entire platform. Nuking the entire platform from orbit is not an appropriate remedy, and in any case should be done through a court of law, not through the actions of a monopolistic cartel.
johncessna 6y ago
I'll simplify the issue for you. Your tribe won out in this particular battle but you're worried that may not always be the case. You should absolutely be worried about that.
- drummer 6y ago
  That was excellent.
munificent 6y ago
I don't think it's inconsistent to simultaneously believe: * In general, tech companies should be less powerful and monopolistic. * In this specific case, the tech companies used the power they have in a way that is overall beneficial to society. Trump incited a violent insurrection on the US Capitol. If Senators and Representatives had not successfully escaped through tunnels before the rioters got to them, some of them would be dead. The fact that Trump is still in office after that shows that the US absolutely does not have a functioning legislative branch to check Trump's executive power. In the absence of that, we need some entity powerful enough to push back against rising fascism and authoritarianism. I don't like that that power apparently has to be a handful of tech giant companies, but I'll take that (temporarily at least) over the US becoming a right-wing dictatorship.
- codekilla 6y ago
  This seems fair. > the US absolutely does not have a functioning legislative branch I'm more concerned by this than anything else. In effect this results in calcified government, which can neither regulate tech companies (or anything) effectively, or serve as a check on executive power. People need to start moving to Wyoming and Alaska, yeah the weather sucks.....but we need to redefine 'civic duty'.
nappy-doo 6y ago
It's like a newspaper, with editors deciding which letters to the editor to publish or not. Tech companies are really media companies, it's just that we don't consume dead trees anymore.
mariodiana 6y ago
Parler was not a "hate site." It's a social media platform that chose to take a reactive rather than proactive approach to policing illegal behavior, and experienced the growing pains of an up-and-comer advertising itself as a Twitter alternative that then had to deal with a flood of Twitter refugees during a political crisis. The overwhelming vast majority of the people on Parler were simply normal people tired of what they perceived as a double standard in Twitter's treatment of conservatives as opposed to liberals, and wished to support a competitor.
danielrpa 6y ago
Would Voltaire's famous "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it" apply here? Perhaps we need a better, faster judicial mechanism for taking down "major content". I'm not saying the government is a great solution for this problem, but IMHO it beats the status quo until we can find a better system.
- ip26 6y ago
  Your right to say it (& not be jailed) Not your right to be provided an audience
  - srveale 6y ago
    Exactly. Can you demand to be broadcast by your local TV station? Can you demand that your letter be published by your newspaper? The right to a platform has never been guaranteed. The only difference is that with social media, your message is broadcast first and moderated after.
    - danielrpa 6y ago
      Interesting examples - both Newspapers and TV Stations, for their public "platform" nature, don't enjoy certain libel protections that Social Media does. FB's "platform" feature is largely listener-driven. You can still use FB and not listen to persons X, Y and Z. It's all posted by users, and users decide what to follow or read (except paid content). Not like TV Stations and Newspapers. That's what Social Media companies have been telling us for a while! But if we want apply usual standards of platform rights and responsibilities to FB, we should then require it to also be responsible for what's posted there. You can't have it both ways.
yourapostasy 6y ago
As much as some of the Parler content was definitely awful, I've seen much worse on dialup BBS's and during the Great Cognitive Corruption of Usenet that started in the 80's and greatly accelerated onwards from there. I'm more troubled by the total cessation of infrastructure as the mitigation of choice, rather than a temporary pause of services. During the pause, work with law enforcement to identify those specific posts that satisfy the Brandenberg "imminent" criteria, mark those as redacted, then return to service. Leaving open possible further work with law enforcement to share a feed and tie in redaction by future judicial decisions. I'm hoping I missed where it says that Parler was offered this choice and turned it down. I'm even more troubled by the continued "let them eat cake" dismissive ennui of the chattering classes to the natural-world plights of the most radicalized members of the Trump supporters (and for that matter, to BLM supporters' plights treatment by other chattering classes), as they're pretty much at the "nothing left to lose" stage. Having been not simply ignored since the 70's onwards, but jeered at, derided, and mocked, instead of rehabilitating their life situations, has driven them into the arms of malign ideologies that openly lie to them fealty will improve their lot in life, when no other ideology will have them. Just like in my enterprise work with my clients, when I hear extreme dissatisfaction, that's an opportunity for me to listen, empathize, then work together iteratively to solve problems. Instead, the US treats such expressions as opportunities to suppress. That only guarantees the pressure builds up elsewhere you cannot predict (in enterprise work, it often manifests as political chits being called in, and budget found where none was found before to completely pivot away and build the users' own solution, however imperfect it may be). The US treats many of its have-nots (all along the political spectrum and not just along one vector) like it treats its prisoners. Brutalize with platitude-laden inaction instead of rehabilitate. It's no wonder the nation manufactures a dictatorship-loving consent.
- tjr225 6y ago
  I keep seeing this sentiment pop up here on HN and I've come at it in other posts. All of the Trump supporters I know are upper middle class suburbanites who have been fairly well off for quite a while. Not sure I have any empathy for the contempt at all. I just don't buy this sob story what-so-ever. I feel even less bad for violent extremists that have zero goals or demands except to destabilize everything because they believe whatever they see on the internet. There is no ideology for them to defend; only their right to hate. They only want the ability to have whatever they believe to be true to be the case even when it is not the case. Ironically, if the people who were truly destitute and down-trodden could find some way to ignore the superficial partisanship that they've been sold and unite under social and economic policy we might have an actual movement on our hands. Unfortunately they've all been convinced that their superficial differences aren't superficial at all and that the other side is wrong; now it appears at any cost.
dionian 6y ago
> Parler was a hate site, What evidence do you base this on? Do you have evidence quantifying how Parler users are more hateful than Twitter or Facebook?
arbitrage 6y ago
Hi friend. You don't need to dither over hate speech. It's okay.
dragonwriter 6y ago
> Overall it feels like a legislative failure - in an ideal world, we have laws applied even handedly to deal with this. Whether it will be applied even-handedly remains to be seen, but there is a law to deal with this, and I suspect it's a factor in why businesses of all kinds are running screaming from anything connected to the attacks (including other businesses that fail to themselves cut off any activity with a nexus to the attack, the attackers, and the apparent planning for future attacks): 18 USC Sec 2339A, which makes it a federal crime to knowingly provide any goods or services except medicine and religious materials connected to any of an enumerated list of federal criminal offenses collectively designated “terrorism”, punishable by fines and imprisonment for up to 15 years unless death occurs as a result of the crime, in which case the imprisonment becomes for any term of years or life.
- acomjean 6y ago
  There are laws, but as a practical matter they aren't enforced. Individuals are not held responsible for the threats and illegal speech they make. Look at all the threats made against people on social media. The fact that there is almost no accountability means it keeps happening. The only repercussions most of the time is that the platform kicks you off. Part of it is, its their platform and from a business perspective having you around if you are too toxic isn't wise. It seems like a society problem. Non enforcement and a lot of people with nothing to loose.
intended 6y ago
I’d go a step higher, the normative framework that informs our legislation is old and needs to be examined. We support a market place of ideas because, it was argued that bad ideas would eventually be trumped by better ideas - only by examining bad ideas would we be able to move past them. Part of that remains true today, but it does not account for the realities of mass communication. The model ends up painting a passive, solitary image of ideas. But ideas are neither passive, nor without context. Signal without context is noise. Nor are brains neutral processors of information, they are vulnerable to psyops, malformed arguments, pressure, ignorance and emotion. I have read propaganda, I have seen arguments which sound legitimate, but underlying it is xenophobia and hatred. I know for a fact, that Popper was right and you cannot tolerate the intolerant. They do not come to discuss or exchange ideas. They come to use your platform as an opportunity to gain followers. And they use the gaps in our norms to create space for themselves. Counter speech is not a panacea, it require conditions to work. If those conditions are not satisfied, the strategy fails. The norms behind modern speech need to account for these trade offs. The status quo comes with the trade off that partisanship will increase, more people will be radicalized. This is the trade off, and people have to decide if they are willing to enjoy this trade off.
c54 6y ago
We can empower democratic institutions like the FTC to be able to take action in these cases, rather than leaving important decisions in the hands of private corporations. > ...what Parler is doing should be illegal, because it should be responsible on product liability terms for the known outcomes of its product, aka violence. ... But what Parler is doing is not illegal, because Section 230 means it has no obligation for what its product does.... Similarly, what these platforms did in removing Parler should be illegal, because they should have a public obligation to carry all customers engaging in legal activity on equal terms. But it’s not illegal, because there is no such obligation. These are private entities operating public rights of way, but they are not regulated as such. [0] https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/a-simple-thing-biden-can-do-to-reset https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/a-simple-thing-biden-can-...
- trianglem 6y ago
  Absolutely not. That sounds like Soviet nonsense.
Animats 6y ago
Parler.com is down too. It's been removed from DNS. DNS server is EPIK.COM ("Resilient domains"). Their DNS server is returning 0.0.0.0, instead of NXDOMAIN. The domain is still on Verisign, and they don't seem to be doing anything to it.
- trianglem 6y ago
  Epik.com the refuge of far-right, neo-nazi sites led by Rob Monster epik? Of course it is.
claudiulodro 6y ago
> 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? Parler was co-founded by an unelected billionaire as a "grassroots" way for the Mercers to push their ideology and their version of "acceptable speech". I don't really have any qualms with their power play getting shut down, and I don't think other businesses should be forced to support it.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
millbraebart 6y ago
Would this law also apply to LeBron James when he “incites” black youth by claiming black people “are hunted everyday” by the police? A fact check would show the statistics don’t support such a claim. It’s clearly dangerous speech that needs to be moderated. Why does the left assume nobody has any agency over their own actions?
kofejnik 6y ago
Russia's censorship laws are formulated around 'preventing religious and ethnic hatred' (among other things).
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
slapshot 6y ago
My concern is not that AWS should be forced to host content they don't want. It's that AWS (and Apple, Facebook, and others) have misrepresented what they do. It's no shock that DailyKos shouldn't have to host pro-Trump content. Nor should /theDonald have to host pro-Bernie content. We all agree that people can choose who to associate with, and that free association is important. But AWS (and Facebook and others) didn't say "we're sites that present only one kind of content" the way /theDonald and DailyKos did. They presented themselves as universal tools for people to express themselves, build their own sites, install apps, etc. So it comes as a shock when AWS says "we actually only want to support sites that present views that Jeff Bezos thinks are reasonable." And when Apple says "you can only download apps on your phone that we think do a good enough job moderating." And when Facebook bans people for posting wrong opinions. The government can't and probably shouldn't force AWS to host content that Bezos doesn't agree with. It would be Amazon's right to host only content that is pro-Trump, or equally Amazon's right to only host content that is anti-Trump. But when Amazon presents something as a neutral utility but secretly enforces different rules, we can and should criticize them. That's true even if all the content being removed today is garbage. I haven't seen any "worthwhile" content that's been affected by the recent moves, and I have never heard of any valuable speech on Parler. But I am still concerned that Apple gets to decide what apps I can install on my phone because they don't like the content. For every Apple (managed in California by socially liberal periople) there's a Walmart (managed in Arkansas by social conservatives) that will take the same powers and use them in a different way. Walmart is legally free to remove pro-BLM books from their online bookshelves, but we can and should criticize them if they do.
- gyudin 6y ago
  I feel like erotic, kink and LGBTQ+ communities got hit with all the new rules. Over the last few years they've been kicked out of Tumblr, now Instagram, Twitch and Youtube aren't really happy with non PG13 content, Apple refusing to publish Fetlife app for years or Onlyfans, Pornhub deleting all content from non-partners and so on... Honestly feels like just companies are trying to maximize their profits and "don't be evil" became just an old memory.
b0bb1z3r0 6y ago
You can still say what you want. It’s just harder to say DIVISIVE HATEFUL RACIST INCITING VIOLENCE against blank. (Caps because I don’t have italics on phone, not yelling). I control what’s on my private network. Issue is people “want” to use these networks to spread their “#%$&£x” to the largest audience. These bad faith arguments, because you can’t come to “my house” and cause your trouble. No you don’t have that right. Do it at “your house”. Can someone explain how Twitter/Amazon/Apple/Google owe me?
loceng 6y ago
They aren't deciding what free speech is acceptable, they're deciding what free speech is acceptable on their private platforms. People are pretending like the platforms that deplatformed the group inciting violence are the only platforms on the internet that they could have used, they're not - they're not monopolies in regards to that. They are however the most convenient platforms to use because of various reasons, however we're not talking about having a right to convenience - we're talking about having the right to free speech, which everyone still does in America and on the internet. Some advice: if you're going to have a mob boss and wannabe tyrant like Trump and rally your followers on a platform, I'd recommend using, depending on, technology layers of owners who are aligned with you and okay with inciting of violence; Trump goes on Fox News to say whatever the fuck he wants to millions of people while saying he's being prevented from free speech - come on now people, let's come back to reality and stop getting sucked into the gaslighting.
- exporectomy 6y ago
  Your definition of monopoly is wrong. Microsoft was judged by the court to be abusing its monopoly power by bundling IE with Windows and making it difficult to uninstall even though users could still install competing browsers if they spent the extra effort. There's no natural monopoly that you can't find an alternative to if you're willing to spend enough effort.
  - loceng 6y ago
    That's not a comparable example.
liberal_098 6y ago
IF we proceed from the hypothesis that X is "a hate site, filled with conspiracy theories, radicalization and racism" AND we want to ban the whole platform X, THEN it would be logical to ban also all the layers down the technological stack: AWS, Google Play Store, Telecoms that transported the traffic etc. Indeed, X platform has approximately the same responsibility as other platform layers and hence they all should be punished. Another idea is to punish them proportionally to their ability to check the content published on the platform so that telecoms probably will not be punished at all because they are not able to read encrypted traffic.
- darkarmani 6y ago
  Ban the least layers needed to achieve the goal. The layers closer to the violent speech get the most responsibility. If the next layer refuses to ban the previous layer, then yes: keep going after the next layer in the stack.
charly187 6y ago
"just like I wouldn't bat an eye for AWS taking down an ISIS recruitment site, I don't really see any loss here." There were about 10 million people on Parler before it was taken down. If you really think its comporable to an ISIS recruitment site, we got a much, much bigger problem here.
mcguire 6y ago
I suspect the bottom line is that general anonymity on the internet needs to be discarded. No, wait, hear me out. No moderation isn't acceptable. Really. (If someone wants to make a counter-assertion, I merely point to this site.) Non-transparent, corporate moderation doesn't seem palatable to anyone. There are just too many pitfalls. Independent moderation falls apart when you consider that different fora have different moderation requirements. (A forum for Cinderblock the obese cat is going to be very different from any kind of political or technical site.) The best case seems to me to be case-by-case, transparent moderation with precedents, similar to common law. And ultimately, I expect transparent moderation to, in the extreme, go to the court system, so that's not necessarily a bad starting point. Unfortunately, that falls apart when large numbers of participants are (including, say, moderators) are not speaking in good faith. I see two possible ideas to address that: First, to tie accounts to physical identities (but not necessarily disallowing the account to be effectively anonymous), to cut the number of bots, multiple accounts, etc. Second, to attach an account to a user's reputation (which does break anonymity). The results I see are to cut down on the volume of crap while ensuring users have skin in the game (with a side order of making legal action against stalking, harassment, and threats). But what about those situations that require anonymity? Most of those already have legal and social protections: psychological, religious, and legal counseling, for example. I would support anonymity for those fora, which places responsibility for moderation on the fora, of course, as well as meaning that the moderation cannot be transparent. One area does require special handling: whistleblowing. It does require anonymity, and does not have any current legal or social protections. That needs to be fixed. But anyway, as a general rule, the default for social media should not support anonymity. The only way to free providers like Facebook, Reddit, this site, or AWS from responsibility for what is posted there is to place that responsibility on the actual posters---having no responsibility doesn't work, and giving that power to the discretion of the owner of the provider isn't acceptable. There are some objections that I think I can answer, but this comment is getting too long for me, so I'll wait until anyone cares. And no, the irony of Parler's requirement of photo-ids and (allegedly) SSNs isn't lost on me.
- bnlmx 6y ago
  > but not necessarily disallowing the account to be effectively anonymous With the average opsec of chat sites, would you bet on "effectively"? Ironically Parler itself just had a leak. Even if a company currently has good opsec, it can be acquired and go downhill (or turn evil). In the current climate, this comment could (and would) be construed as implicit support of Parler, with all the consequences. The rich left loves "consequences", except for themselves.
kolbe 6y ago
> On the other hand, do we really want a handful of unelected billionaires deciding what is acceptable speech Elected billionaires (and millionaires/thousandaires) don't do much better.
dogman144 6y ago
> 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? Putting aside questions around whether or not a media filter has always existed in some form... You're using social media hosted on EC2 instances that can be terminated vs instead of your local newspaper and other similar, less directly filtered options. That's the trade off. I don't really see anything unusual about it - a newspaper could fire a writer (or even hire writers that reflect a certain tone), and nobody batted an eye.
downrightmike 6y ago
It is the same thing when they take down any other hate site: bye bye haters. Intolerance cannot be allowed to be free speech. Just like you can't walk into a club and yell fire without consequences. We have tragic historical events that set precedence.
- skrebbel 6y ago
  > Intolerance cannot be allowed to be free speech. That's just "I'm for free speech unless I disagree with the speech", right? Who decides what's too intolerant? We all love our Popper quotes but it's a very hard line to draw. Nearly any opinion can be explained at being somehow intolerant if you try hard enough.
  - downrightmike 6y ago
    Pretty much either you agree that Nazis are bad and those that are like them, regardless of the time period are also bad, or you're an idiot. Hate, violence, threats based there upon, are pretty cut and dry.
    - skrebbel 6y ago
      The world sure is simpler with those black and white glasses on, isn't it!
      - downrightmike 6y ago
        The whole do on to others as you would have them do on to you is not a new concept. And act like a terrorist and do terrorist acts, makes you a terrorist. And we don't support them. In the end if you want to hate people because it makes you feel better, sure go ahead, just keep your mouth shut and don't act.
2OEH8eoCRo0 6y ago
I believe the market will work it out. They overuse this power there will be consequences/outcry. We can figure it out when we get there. I'm not worried about any slippery slope.
hintymad 6y ago
I don't know why it's right to ban conspiracies. Conspiracies are to be debunked, not banned. Otherwise, people who believe such conspiracies simply go underground and we end up cultivating anger, distrust, and cynicism. Is that covid-19 would turn into a global pandemic back in Feb a conspiracy? Is criticizing USSR in the 30s a conspiracy? Is that earth is not the center of our universe a conspiracy 700 years ago? Is that FBI's infiltration and surveillance on political groups a conspiracy? Are all the questioning on the reasons for the US to invade Iraq conspiracy theories? Where are the WMDs now? In general, are we sure that no conspiracy ever turned out to be true? How many heresies turned out to be correct and changed the course of our history? And how many people were persecuted in the name of spreading conspiracy? Why are we so afraid of conspiracies?
- JKCalhoun 6y ago
  > I don't know why it's right to ban conspiracies. Conspiracies are to be debunked, not banned. No one is threatening to kill an elected official over grassy knolls. Times change.
  - hintymad 6y ago
    That’s hate speech, and it’s illegal to threaten a person with death. It’s different from banning conspiracy theory
- markkanof 6y ago
  Right. It's frustrating that the term conspiracy theory has become a blunt weapon that can be used to quickly dismiss allegations of wrong doing and paint the accuser as a fringe lunatic. Sometimes people do evil things or conspire with others to do evil things (see Tuskegee experiments, Epstein, etc.). Just because someone doesn't currently have irrefutable proof that something happened doesn't mean that they shouldn't be able to talk about it.
- eigenrick 6y ago
  Most of the modern, big conspiracies have been thoroughly debunked, but that doesn't stop their spread. Any flat-earther has heard all of the flat-earth debunking. Sadly, I know a handful of flat-earthers, and I tried arguing for a while, but it does no good. Instead it appears that the theorists double-down on the conspiracy. I think people believe in conspiracies, not because they're mislead on a certain topic, but because they want to believe. So debunking conspiracies is attacking their faith, which is what causes zealotry. It's more like spreading a religion, which, yeah, you can't really ban it. You just have to let people do their thing. tl;dr I agree that one shouldn't censor it, but only because it does no good.
f430 6y ago
> Parler was a hate site Have you seen Twitter, Reddit? It's filled with hate, conspiracy, radicalization and racism. It's astounding how quickly people fall back to their dfault political leanings and stop being objective. If they can do this to Parler citing politically motivated excuse to shut them down, what stops your company from getting booted off the internet because some of your users posted "lets blow stuff up"? This sets a dangerous precedent going forward and it affects all of us regardless of your political spectrum. I get that AWS is an independent commercial entity that has its own terms but do you realize the problem of trusting billionaires and their monopoly to always do the right thing? Tomorrow, the currents might change, and it could be you too. First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist....
- zmmmmm 6y ago
  That's where I think people are missing the point to some extent. I'm taking on good faith what was reported by these companies - but their statements claimed they observed actual concrete planning to organise actual violence and further insurrection. Stopping speech is one thing. But the claim is it is not the speech they are worried about, it is the violence. The infrastructure is being used for more than speech. Removing the infrastructure is being done to impede those larger effects. Does it change the flavor if I rewrite the phrase as First they came for the murderers and I did not speak out ... ?
  - f430 6y ago
    Facebook and Twitter has been used to organize violence and overthrow governments too.
    - zmmmmm 6y ago
      I don't think an argument of consistency really works here. Sure that has happened. And possibly in those countries they suffered consequences for their part in that. That does not mean they should not apply those principles in the US, in this instance. All these things are context specific, driven by judgement taking into account the whole circumstances.
cmiles74 6y ago
In my opinion, things are working as expected. The US federal and state level governments are not supposed to regulate speech, per the US Constitution. In this case they are not regulating speech. Private companies are regulating speech (in their applications, through their services and websites, etc.) as they are free to do under the US Constitution. While there may be a market for the speech Parler promotes and amplifies that market is not sufficiently large (in the opinion of these companies) to offset possible bad public relations or the loss of other customers. I don't think there's any place for legislation that forces private companies to take a loss in this manner. It's clearly anti-free market and definitely anti-free speech, forcing Amazon to associate with speech they feel might harm the companies financial outlook. Also, is it necessary? There are many BitTorrent tracker sites that are treated as illegal in the US and are still available. If Parler was really dedicated to keeping their website running they could surely do so. Maybe they won't have applications in the Apple App Store but that's not a right, is it? You have to have product that Apple feels helps the overall goal of their App Store, which is to make money for Apple.
- rootsudo 6y ago
  "Private companies are regulating speech (in their applications, through their services and websites, etc.) as they are free to do under the US Constitution. " Technically, there is no barrier that restricts a corporation from granting free space, so it isn't "free" to do so, moreso that it was not addressed because at the time of the framing of the constitution, the bigger dissenters of free speech were government, and religion, backed by government (or being the government.)
  - cmiles74 6y ago
    I disagree that this was an oversight of the of the US Constitution. Newspapers and books were both things when the US Constitution was written and, in all the years since, we haven't seen any amendments that would force a newspaper to print articles or letters that might cost them customers. Publishers are not forced to publish books that they feel might tarnish or otherwise harm their brands. Indeed, it's my position that such laws would in fact be infringing on the free speech of those private companies. In addition they might cost those companies money, making these hypothetical laws also anti-free market.
flowerlad 6y ago
> do we really want a handful of unelected billionaires deciding what is acceptable speech Historically newspapers, television and radio have decided what is acceptable to be published through their media. There is no reason modern internet-based media should be any different. On the internet everything can appear equally legitimate. Breitbart looks as legit as the BBC. Sacha Baron Cohen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymaWq5yZIYM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymaWq5yZIYM Excerpts: Voltaire was right when he said "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." And social media lets authoritarians push absurdities to millions of people. President Trump using Twitter has spread conspiracy theories more than 1700 times to his 67 million followers. Freedom of speech is not freedom of reach. Sadly There will always be racists, misogynists, anti-Semites, and child abusers. We should not be giving bigots and pedophiles a free platform to amplify their views and target their victims. Zuckerberg says people should decide what's credible, not tech companies. When 2/3rds of millennials have not heard of Auschwitz how are they supposed to know what's true? There is such a thing as objective truth. Facts do exist.
baryphonic 6y ago
> 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. (I'm going to leave aside the unfounded assertion that Parler was a "hate site." If it is, then every popular website is a "hate site," from Facebook and Google all the way down. Scores of prominent people who aren't hateful but for bizarre Left-wing constructions of the word "hate" use Parler to communicate with millions of people who are themselves not hateful conspiracy theorists.) I always feel there's an unjustified logical jump on the part of authoritarian sentiments such as this. The argument seems to be, "X hosts hateful content that it refuses to remove. If we remove X, then we will have reduced hate." This doesn't make much sense. Has anyone's mind actually changed because of Parler? It makes even less sense for conspiracy theories, where censorship makes conspiracy theorists feel like they're on the right track. I remember looking up some moon landing hoaxer content on YouTube probably five to eight years ago. There was a lot of it on YouTube, but then YouTube also recommended some debunking videos (a few of which had been made specifically in response to the conspiracy theory videos themselves). The debunking videos were just frankly more persuasive. (The only issue with my little experiment was that the "Algorithm" recommended me conspiracy nonsense for a few weeks after.) There were no passive-aggressive, condescending propaganda boxes, no appeals to the authority of the media or legal system, no "fact checks." Just arguments for and against. This is not to say that people can't do bad things with speech. We have stories like a random lynch mob forming in India over a viral series of videos shared via WhatsApp.[1] There are other stories like this. All are appalling. And technology has removed frictions that existed before to keep these things from happening. But let's not forget that the world in which speech is restricted is much, much scarier. The Rwandan genocide of 1994 was perpetrated by the most powerful members of Rwandan society, who used their monstrous power to slaughter Tutsis as well as moderate Hutus who spoke against the killings. In the South under Jim Crow, speech was also violently suppressed with the aid of the states, who turned a blind eye to terrorist groups like the Klan going after black southerners or even white "race traitors" with lynching. "Censorship, but only for the bad stuff" seems to be an unworkable system. People get riled up, and the consequences can be horrific, but they seem worse in a regime with heavy censorship that doesn't allow a safety valve for the bad ideas. [1] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/pranavdixit/whatsapp-destroyed-village-lynchings-rainpada-india https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/pranavdixit/whatsapp-de...
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
riccccccc 6y ago
Lets not forget that Twitter just last month signed a new deal with Amazon to be hosted on AWS. Don't suppose this has anything to do with Amazon booting Twitter's largest competitor from the platform do you? As for hateful rhetoric on Parler, that same hateful rhetoric exists on Twitter as well, don't fool yourself, it is only the fact that it is the left threatening the right that anyone allows it. Remember when Kathy Griffin held the bloody head of the President, or the current rise up and kill cops tweets you find everywhere on Twitter. Or the white people should all be dead tweets? Whether you agree to it or not does not therefore make hate speech. There is no clear cut defined line for hate speech to begin with. Anything can be declared hate speech, hell what I am saying now could be considered hate speech because I actually defend Parler and the people on its right to speech. At least then we can show examples of see this guy right here? He is a moron and believes in really dumb stuff. All they are doing by silencing these people is forcing them deeper underground where even more nefarious ideas and figures lie becoming more radicalized and more violent. But I guess that is what establishment wants, a perpetual idea to scare people with so that they give up even more freedom of thought.
throw0101a 6y ago
> 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? And what did start-ups do before AWS et al? Didn't they 'just': rent a rack, fill it with computers, get an ASN/IP block, and make it accessible by DNS? I understand it's more 'agile' to just spin up instances as needed, but are we in a place that the Old Way can no longer work? (At least theoretically.) Doesn't Stack Overflow (still?) run on their own hardware? * https://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/03/29/stack-overflow-the-hardware-2016-edition/ https://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/03/29/stack-overflow-the-ha...
rodgerd 6y ago
> On the other hand, do we really want a handful of unelected billionaires deciding what is acceptable speech Billionaires like the Mercer family, who fund Parler? You're on a site run as part of the outreach for a VC firm where the owners are best buds with Peter Theil, Facebook board member, early Trump backer, a billionaire who literally hunted for a chance to sue a news organization out of existence because he didn't like a story they wrote about him; a site where a large number of the companies they fund and people who comment are intimately involved with AdTech and/or social media. And you're only now noticing that billionaires have an unreasonable sway on discourse? You didn't notice that not only does Rupert Murdoch own print press, book publishing, an TV all over the English-speaking world? You didn't notice the Mercer family also setting up Cambridge Analytica and being principal backers of Brexit?

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.

dahfizz 6y ago
> This isn't some theoretical case of billionaires imposing their worldviews by banning people that we should be tremendously fearful of. I think you've missed the point. The concern OP raises is that this is no longer theoretical - these few billionaires actually can impose their worldview by controlling speech. In this case, we can all agree that Parler had to go. But the precedent / principle of the issue can be considered separately. > They're not deciding what is acceptable speech. They're deciding what is acceptable speech for their platforms and services. This is a distinction without a difference. If the major platforms all ban you, you are silenced. Its time we recognize the power these platforms have.
- big_curses 6y ago
  > This is a distinction without a difference. I disagree, there is an extreme difference there. Freedom of speech is specifically in regards to the government giving you the negative right of being able to say whatever you want without government prosecution (aside from some edge cases like direct threats and the like, which are closer to actual violence). What they do not do is guarantee you a platform. You are free to say whatever you like, but you are not owed the right to be listened to. Removing someone from a platform is not silencing them. A private company does not owe you anything, let alone service.
  - robertlagrant 6y ago
    No. The first amendment is about the government. The concept of freedom of speech is broader. If in a pandemic I can only legally communicate via digital tools, and the billionaires running the digital tools all decide to ban me, I am silenced.
    - 8note 6y ago
      It is not true that you can only legally communicate via digital tools. The US still has a post office

erdeszt 6y ago

I kind of feel the same as you. I'm happy that Parler is gone but on the other hand I think that Google, Facebook, Amazon and Twitter are monopolies and should be broken up.

Grimm1 6y ago
I agree. I see a lot of people pushing to give them special status or make them town squares and I think that is the exact opposite solution we need. We should take anti-monopoly action and foster competition in their respective markets instead.
sidr 6y ago
These are 4 different companies that compete with each other (Google Cloud vs. AWS and Facebook vs. Twitter, also although you didn't list it Apple vs. Google) in the spaces relevant to this conversation (cloud services, social media, and phone apps). One can always list all the players in an industry and call that set "a monopoly and should be broken up". Or we can just take this for what it is, which is that some entity is so toxic that none of these companies (which compete with each other otherwise) want to touch it.
- erdeszt 6y ago
  Google has monopoly on search, Amazon on online retail and to a lesser extent cloud hosting, Facebook on social media. Twitter on 140 character word dumps so that's maybe not at the same level bad as the others. Edit: Apple doesn't really have a monopoly on anything.
JohnBooty 6y ago
Google, Facebook, Amazon and Twitter are monopolies and should be broken up. Dominant market share != monopoly For a monopoly, you need anticompetitive practices. Is Facebook unfairly preventing the success of other social networks? A good example of a monopoly was 90's era Microsoft, which prevented its OEMs from shipping competing operating systems. Terminology aside, I completely agree with you that we need far, far more choice in the marketplace.

helen___keller 6y ago

I don't think there's an easy answer. 2 possible solutions: (1) deplatforming could be either a democratic process, or be challengeable through some kind of democratic process. (2) deplatforming could be at the sole discretion of platforms, but the platforms themselves need to use open standards and protocols such that it is sufficiently easy for those who were deplatformed to switch to the opposition or self-platform (for example: ios allowing competing app stores). This would be difficult and technically challenging to enact in many situations (what does it mean in the case of social networks for example?), And if there's no competition we need antitrust ASAP If all the competition are also deplatforming you, I think at a certain point it becomes fair to say that you were more or less democratically rejected, much like if every bar in town kicks out neo-nazis that's not a failure of free speech but a success of the free market. But that relies on a large, healthy, robust competitive ecosystem which does not exist in a billionaire-dominated tech scene.

weeboid 6y ago
> (1) deplatforming could be either a democratic process, or be challengeable through some kind of democratic process. Think gay wedding cakes > (2) ... but the platforms themselves need to use open standards and protocols Open standards and protocols like `https` and HTML?
kirghiz 6y ago
A form of ostracism, you mean? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostracism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostracism

mattbee 6y ago

> 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? No, because you don't need AWS or Twitter or Cloudflare or any of the name tech companies to run a high-traffic web site successfully.

zhobbs 6y ago
You need an ISP right? You think telecom companies are anxious to provide them bandwidth?
- evgen 6y ago
  Telecom companies are common carriers and do not have the luxury of being able to deny customers access if they are not breaking the law. Nothing preventing these people from starting up their own ISP and hosting company.
  - uberduper 6y ago
    Nothing stopping them from fabricating their own silicon too, right? How far down this hole till we reach the bottom? I wonder if this was the same sort of argument used to justify denying minorities homes / home loans? "Well they're free to build their own house!" "Well they're free to cut their own lumber!" "Well they're free to forge their own hammers!" "Well they're free to..."
    - minkzilla 6y ago
      Thank you for this example. I’ll be using it. I’ve been struggling to articulate that just because technically someone is free to do something doesn’t mean they aren’t being meaningfully hindered from doing it.
    - filoeleven 6y ago
      Denying people homes or loans because of race is vastly different, because one’s race is an inherited physical characteristic.[1] Here, companies are denying service to Parler based on the beliefs (edit: and behavior) of its users. This situation lies somewhere between “refusing service based on someone’s religion” and “refusing service because I just don’t like them.” Political affiliation is not yet recognized as a religious belief, so they are not a protected class. I don’t know enough about the law to say on what grounds a company stands if they drop/refuse service because they think someone is being a dick. [1] it’s more nuanced than that of course, but I’m speaking broadly here

kevwil 6y ago

Gonna disagree there a bit, semantically. Parler was a no-censorship social site, open to everyone. Extreme right-wing people flocked to it while very few people with other perspectives did. Parler being a hate site was not purely of their making, but rather a result of society's bias toward silencing opposing views. We need more people like Daryl Davis (a black jass musician who has converted hundreds of KKK members through kindness and friendship and music) so that censorship seems less and less like a good idea. I'm not surprised at the end result, but the effort to retain free speech was a valiant one. Forcing extremist views underground doesn't silence them, it emboldens them and makes it harder to know what they're up to. Not a good idea.

MrMan 6y ago
"society's bias toward silencing opposing views." censorship is NOT the underlying problem here
ForHackernews 6y ago
I don't think this is exactly true, according to other seemingly well-informed comments on this site, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25731121 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25731121 Parler was moderated, and it was explicitly moderated for coherence with a right-wing/reactionary viewpoint. It was not a neutral, unfiltered platform.
Miner49er 6y ago
> Parler was a no-censorship social site, open to everyone. This is just false. They censored all kinds of things: antifa, parody accounts, obscene usernames, porn, etc. 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...

MrMan 6y ago

Libertarianism == billionaires subbing in for government. this is what we get

dahfizz 6y ago
Are you implying our government, which spends $6.6 trillion a year and jails people for smoking weed, is libertarian in nature?
- kingaillas 6y ago
  I think your statement is the reverse of what was implied. Doesn't libertarianism posit a weak central government, shedding all responsibilities (that can be shed) to the free market, where competition ensures the best outcomes, choices for all, etc? If that's true, the current situation of wealthy corporations controlling various social media platforms is... the desired outcome? The fact that competition is better in areas such as motor vehicles, due to physical standards like roads that work for everyone, lack of network effects, and so on, is beside the point. It isn't the government's fault that Orkut and MySpace didn't compete well against Facebook, or that Parler entered a service contract with another corporation that decided their TOS was violated. This will all be sorted out in the courts, interpreting contracts which are the ultimate source of truth in the libertarian world view. Fear nothing, justice will prevail. If Parler was not in violation of the contract, they will be compensated. If they were, too bad, they failed to adhere to the contract they agreed to. They deserve to fail and the NEXT competitor to take up the mantle will have incrementally better information and chances to succeed.
  - dahfizz 6y ago
    That's like saying "Humans produce carbon dioxide, cars produce carbon dioxide, lets study human anatomy to learn how cars work". OP's statement of "this is what we get" strongly implies that the current state of things is somehow the result of libertarian policies. There is nothing libertarian about our government. That's why I bring up the extremely high spending and unjust laws we have. Blaming libertarianism for anything happening in the world requires some serious mental gymnastics. China also has large corporations, should we blame libertarianism for all the human rights offences happening there?

arethuza 6y ago

"do we really want a handful of unelected billionaires deciding what is acceptable speech" That's pretty much been newspapers in the UK for as long as I can remember!

Synaesthesia 6y ago
Yes but the solution is not to now hand them more power.
- vehementi 6y ago
  More, or less? It's easier than ever to DIY a site on your own infrastructure and be reachable by everyone in the world
  - guerrilla 6y ago
    Can you DIY your own domain registrar and payment processor though?
  - CrazyPyroLinux 6y ago
    Until they coordinate to shut you down...
amanaplanacanal 6y ago
I’m in the US, and old enough to remember the time before the Internet, and that’s what I remember. You had three or so TV networks and a handful of national magazines and newspapers. Big tech isn’t really any different from the media zeitgeist I grew up with. It’s just the last 20 years or so of everybody having a megaphone that is outside the norm.
- Zambyte 6y ago
  It is very different. Everyone saw the same or very similar information on the TV. People watching the same channels would see the exact same thing. With social media, your feed is perfectly catered to you as an individual, by using as much data on you as they can get their hands on, and a nearly endless supply of content from the "megaphones" of other users. Even if you have many of the same friends as someone, and politically align with them, you probably would find scrolling through their feed to be less interesting than scrolling through your own.

cmsonger 6y ago

> 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? I think it's fine to be concerned about the principle while in agreement on this use. Both things can be true. And FWIW, that's the state in which I find myself. The president used Twitter to promote lies about the election that were consumed by his followers who then used social media to plan and execute violence in the US capitol. When that same cycle threatened to repeat, these companies stepped in. Good for them, what was their other choice? But appropriate action in this case does not mean that the process and standards used are OK in the arbitrary case and completely agree that lack of legislative standards is the problem. The tech companies had not good choices here because as a society we've not yet set any reasonable rules.

ruined 6y ago
This same power has been used, on a less dramatic scale over the past year and for a long time before now, to attack police reform activists and disrupt organizing of the local activist communities that exist to oppose this shit on the ground. It's not really a situation of "this may be socially chilling", it's been happening, and now it's just the first time they contravened the president and made the news cycle. I don't really see any other decision they could have made this past week. But if social media and capital in general would stop kneecapping every political option but ineffective liberalism and dogwhistle fascism, maybe the large numbers of people who are angry and feel helpless would currently have a pressure valve in a healthier direction. Three or four massive companies with incentives to suppress the slightest disruption to profit, that hold unprecedented surveillance power, and exercise detailed control over individual and mass communication, that make apparently ideological decisions about who is allowed to exist online, are not compatible with a healthy society or any path that could lead us out of this situation.
- creato 6y ago
  "Opposing this shit on the ground" is why we're in this nightmare in the first place. Imagine if there had been counterprotestors "opposing this shit on the ground" at the Capitol insurrection: we'd probably be pretty fucking close to a civil war right now instead of near universal condemnation of the extremist forces. If you have anything to do with "opposing this shit on the ground", please fucking stop. You are accomplishing less than nothing.

indigochill 6y ago

> 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? I think this question conflates "private company exercises right to refuse service" and "private company decides what's acceptable speech". The internet is not truly centralized and no tech giant has a monopoly on speech. There remains plenty of internet real estate to host ideas on that's not owned by tech giants. I think it should remain the right of these companies not to do business with organizations they choose not to and that said organization should also have the right to find another provider who will do business with them (or create their own if need be). Is this not basically the same as porn hosting? There are hosts who don't want to be associated with it, and there are hosts who have no qualms taking porn money.

cm2187 6y ago
Google and Apple have a duopoly on mobile platforms, which are the natural place for any communication app. If those two act in concert you are facing a monopoly. There are only two ways out. Competition or regulation. For AWS, I agree there are many alternatives, and in fact what shocked me wasn’t so much that they terminated their contract with Parler, but the fact that they seem to have done so with zero notice period. Which I find extremely cavalier.
- iaHN 6y ago
  Regulatory capture prevents competition. Money influencing politics prevents regulation.
  - freeone3000 6y ago
    What regulation prohibits you from making a phone OS, even for an existing phone? Or your own android build? Or your own store on Android?
  - cm2187 6y ago
    Up to a certain point. No amount of money would prevent congress from toughening bank regulations after the financial crisis. I also doubt that the republicans are going to give big tech companies a pass when they come back to power.

deeeeplearning 6y ago

No one cried like this when Stormfront was taken down. These "Libertarian" Ayn Rand type morons just dressed up the white supremacy in a hipster tie and beard and suddenly its all about free speech.

whateveracct 6y ago
seriously - Parler just slapped some SV branding on it all, and now they get to tap into the average HNer's contrarianism to garner their support.

Moodles 6y ago

> On one hand, Parler was a hate site, filled with conspiracy theories, radicalization and racism. This is a question in good faith. Can you provide any evidence at all that Parler had more “hate” than Twitter, etc.?

eximius 6y ago
1. Probably. Take a look at some of the Parker dumps before it was shut down. Calls for death squads weren't couched in metaphor. 2. Even if not, Twitter, as much as I loathe it, also has many non-hateful users. Parler was a haven for alt-right extremism.
- dionidium 6y ago
  Anybody who has ever talked about housing on Twitter or Facebook knows that pictures of Mao and guillotines frequently accompany calls to kill all landlords (just to take one example I'm familiar with). Are these legitimate calls to violence? Or just jokey memes? Is there a difference? Who decides that? In what sense do these posts not demonstrate support for political violence?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - dageshi 6y ago
    In the case of Parler, it turned out that yes, the calls to violence were real and not jokes. You might say all these platforms previously gave Parler the benefit of the doubt and then were faced with incontrovertible evidence that Parler was facilitating political violence.
  - xref 6y ago
    Replace “landlords” with “black people” and ask the same questions. Report the posts.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]

grumple 6y ago

How is this different from any other moderation? Nobody would bat an eye if you were banned from HN or reddit for hate speech. Why should a platform be any different? If my customer started using my services to spread Nazism, I'd ban them too. Let's say I was a baker - would it be reasonable that I be compelled to draw swastikas on cakes? Obviously, that's absurd! It is equally absurd to demand that other businesses provide platforms for behavior they don't condone. Freedom of speech is freedom from oppression by government. Parler isn't being oppressed, they just aren't being given a platform to oppress others by private citizens and corporations. Well, not anymore, although lots of corps made some money from them while they could.

tannedNerd 6y ago
I think the issue is that the town square that the first is supposed to protect doesn’t exist anymore. The town square is now Twitter, and valid or not, the de-platforming of a lot of conservatives is going to have a lasting backlash against tech companies. I wouldn’t be surprised to see GOP resurgence in 2022, along with another very real attack on section 230.
- dleslie 6y ago
  With the town square metaphor: while you cannot be prosecuted for what you say in the square, you can be persecuted by your civilian peers; folks may stop speaking to you, or begin informing others of your nature. Twitter et al booting persons from their services is the neighbour slamming their door in your face, or the baker refusing to do business with you. The town square is tcp/ip, not the services on top of it.
- mullen 6y ago
  Twitter is not the town square since real town squares are owned by the State. They are public spaces for all and, let me point out, that you usually need a permit to speak or have a rally. So they are not that free as everyone thinks. Twitter is more like a mall owned by a large corporation and while there is some trouble there, they will kick people off the property that are too offensive. If you try to start an insurrection at a mall, you will be kicked out and banned. It is in Twitters and mall owners best interest to start insurrections on their properties because there will be ramifications for allowing that to happen, that is not good for business.

artificialLimbs 6y ago

Freedom of speech doesn't aim to protect speech that is 'nice'.

evgen 6y ago
Freedom of speech aims to protect speech from government suppression, not from societal norms or the consequences of that speech in the marketplace.
- zajio1am 6y ago
  The pivotal book about freedom of speech, 'On Liberty' from J. S. Mill, is predominantly interested in freedom from societal suppression, not just government suppression: "Like other tyrannies, the tyranny of the majority was at first, and is still vulgarly, held in dread, chiefly as operating through the acts of the public authorities. But reflecting persons perceived that when society is itself the tyrant - society collectively, over the separate individuals who compose it - its means of tyrannising are not restricted to the acts which it may do by the hands of its political functionaries. Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough: there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development, and, if possible, prevent the formation, of any individuality not in harmony with its ways, and compel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own."
  - gamblor956 6y ago
    This book had no bearing on the First Amendment's conception of freedom of speech, seeing as how it was written several decades after the formation of the U.S. This book may have been pivotal to British utilitarianists, but it didn't have much, if any, impact on the U.S.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

ball_of_lint 6y ago

This is exactly the point that the article misses. It's not contradictory to hold the views that "This was the right decision" and "This decision shouldn't have been up to private companies". While there are significant improvements that could be made to our laws, the most significant failure here is one of enforcement. When Republican senators chose not to hear witnesses during the impeachment trial they took a significant step towards making Donald Trump a despot and legitimizing the alt-right. The recent strife is a direct consequence.

robertlagrant 6y ago
Come on. People keep citing "key events" that led to this. It's silly. The rioters would've not rioted if more witnesses had been heard? You think they even are aware of the trial proceedings?
- MajorBee 6y ago
  If these witnesses were presented and heard, leading to (long shot maybe, but still) a conviction by the Senate of Trump, of course, things would have been very different today. You can argue that the violent events of last week would have simply taken place early last year, but at least it might not have threatened peaceful transfer of power after the elections.

gamblor956 6y ago

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? That has always been the history of media, see Hearst, Murdoch, Mercer, etc. The democracy of the early Internet was the exception from billionaires being in charge, not the norm. Hearst used to be the voice of print media for decades. The situation in radio is the same as it is on the internet: a few publicly-owned companies own a supermajority of the FM airwaves. If you wonder why you can change the station and hear the same song simultaneously on 5 different stations, it's because they're all owned by the same company. In TV, for most of the past 2 decades, conservative billionaires have owned more than 75% of the public TV stations in the U.S. and Australia, and have been using that bully pulpit on behalf of conservatives during that time. Murdoch especially was instrumental in providing Trump (and other extremist candidates like Cruz) thousands of hours of free coverage during the 2016 campaign. The ownership groups would regularly interfere with local media and demand they either air or avoid topics as directed by ownership. Where was conservative outrage over billionaires deciding speech during this time?

1123581321 6y ago
I think one difference is that people inhabit and create social media in a way that they didn't with print and TV. A significant percentage of our lives is spent in these de factor public squares. As a media company that 'creates' tweets to be displayed on CNN, etc., or read by logged out users, the analogy to traditional media is more straightforward.

dboreham 6y ago

As opposed to billionaires like Rupert Murdoch?

zarkov99 6y ago

How was it different from Facebook? Plenty of hate there, for months, why aren't they shutdown? Just listen to the Parler executives account of what happened. Contrary to all the nonsense being spewed by ideologues, Parler did have a moderation policy that prohibited incitement to violence, and they did enforce it, but it was neither perfect nor instantaneous (since, by deliberate choice, only humans were involved). They also complied to the requests from the three tech titans, but of course that did not matter, their fate was sealed before the first letter was sent. This is a moment of astonishing hypocrisy and terrible abuse of power. Silicon Valley has proven to half of America that the system is rigged beyond recourse, and for a number of those Americans that might be the straw that breaks the camels back, leading them into radicalization and terrorism. It would be very wise for all of us in tech, in any position of influence, to urge calm and dialogue and to provide space for all speech that is not urging violence. We are not children to throw away our country because of a single deranged fool. We need to show to the country that tech is not an instrument available to only those of a certain ideological bent and that we can talk and sort out our differences without violence or repression.

colinmhayes 6y ago
Parler was created to be a place where the alt-right could freely spout their lies without fear of censorship. Facebook has that, but it's not the reason the platform exists. The intent is completely different.
- zarkov99 6y ago
  And who is it that decides what is Parler's intent and allots the corresponding thought-crime punishment? I am sorry but your point is absurd.
  - sbarre 6y ago
    People digging into Parler found out that all new users were shadowbanned by default until a group of like-minded moderators reviewed and approved their posts. These moderators were overwhelmingly MAGA/Trump supporters, so I'm sure you can guess what kind of posts they expected to see before they unblocked a new user. This was all shared/revealed on Twitter, so take it as "evidence" with whatever grain of salt you like, but people didn't just make up these claims about what Parler was.. So while perhaps Parler claimed to be a place for open debate and unrestricted ideas, it is seems that was just a thin cover for their much more focused goal of being a home for all this extremist right-wing talk in America.

Grustaf 6y ago

Isn’t the solution pretty simple? Make platforms choose, either only remove illegal material, or be regulated as a publisher. Would take care of calls to violence and freedom of speech.

exporectomy 6y ago
Would also put a huge burden on small businesses. I run a little forum for by business. I want to remove spam and off-topic posts, so I'll be classed as a publisher, but I don't want to be subject to restrictions of "Publishers may be held liable for omissions, mistakes, and transgressions of their authors". What if a user quotes somebody else's words but doesn't use proper quotation marks? My problem!
- Grustaf 6y ago
  Well, marking posts as spam or off-topic isn’t the same thing as blocking someone though, so there should be a middle ground. And in any case, it seems pretty straightforward to forbid platforms from banning PEOPLE, it should only be possible to ban utterances. At the very least, Trump should have a legal right to be unbanned as long as he doesn’t post things that Twitter doesn’t allow.

jquery 6y ago

I’ve been using Parler since June to discuss fairly mainstream views and talk about day to day life on a Twitter alternative. This week that option was taken away from me, without due process for me or the company in question. The alleged violations were nothing I hadn’t seen on Twitter, except Twitter regularly hosts even worse content, but I guess it has enough important people using it to crush alternatives on shaky claims and spotty evidence.

threatofrain 6y ago

We should really be talking about Ron Paul because as a test plaintiff Parker is awful. Per their CEO, law firms, banks and payment providers, mail and texting services have also cancelled on them. By that point, what would having your own tech stack do? How do you even collect revenue when banks and payment providers cancel on you? This is the power of freedom of association at work, the power behind cancellation.

CrazyPyroLinux 6y ago
Indeed - Ron Paul is not so much the "canary in the coalmine" - this is the whole mining crew succumbing to the toxic fumes! Even for people who don't agree with his libertarian politics, there's no arguing that he is anything short of an uncommonly decent man. He's certainly the closest I've ever seen anyone come to being the mythical "honest politician." So of course they're attacking him...
- trianglem 6y ago
  What? He wrote a whole bunch of extremely racist op-eds about how black people are inferior and slavery was a boon to them. Your post is a lot of dissembling nonsense.
  - CrazyPyroLinux 6y ago
    That seems unlikely. Do you have links to any reliable primary sources, if they haven't been conveniently censored? I have a hunch that any "extremely racist" comments may have been more to the effect that although slavery was very bad indeed, there might have been better ways to dismantle it than by half the country fighting the other half [0], which is a sentiment worth considering in the context of current events. [0] https://www.lewrockwell.com/2007/12/bob-murphy/ron-paul-and-the-economics-of-slavery/ https://www.lewrockwell.com/2007/12/bob-murphy/ron-paul-and-...

hn_asker 6y ago

You as the consumer accepted the terms of service of the hosting site. So don't be surprised when things like this happen once you've violated the terms of service.

bordercases 6y ago
This will push towards a balkanization of the Internet at the platform level as people will want to self-determine the terms of service for the basis of their communication. Second boom spurred by corporate hubris. You might think there's nothing wrong with this hubris, depending on how comfy your pockets are when lined with their money. The grand majority of the world will not agree – they are not paid by them, when they are they are not treated fairly, and if they are treated fairly they are likely within a sociological bubble.
- JohnBooty 6y ago
  This will push towards a balkanization of the Internet at the platform level as people will want to self-determine the terms of service for the basis of their communication. This seems like a good outcome. Rather than arguing about whether or not Facebook and Twitter should allow various kinds of content, folks can choose the sorts of spaces to which they'd rather belong. And it's not like you have to pick one and only one. It just seems like a non-problem. My feeling is that most people would not like to belong to a space where open racism and other abhorrent views are tolerated and encouraged. Those that do can have their fringe spaces, but they shouldn't expect mainstream companies to help them do so.
  - bordercases 6y ago
    At the level of speech, yes I agree with you. It becomes a problem when these commercial platforms meddle with government business and the social contract. Things everyone is supposed to have and equally. This means access to fundamental goods and services – health, banking, food and water, employment, emancipation, etc. Software only gets to eat the world if it involves itself in every industry and aspect of life, end to end. And no one makes money in startups unless you are a unicorn (unlikely) or acquired by a large existing player (more likely). Where does this go in a post-COVID recovery with 60% unemployment and the destruction of small business? I never thought I would say this, but I have become a fan of Europe's approach to regulation. They've pushed for GDPR which at least gets us the ability to obtain and delete our data, they've acknowledged the right to repair, and as self-serving as it may be, they understand the ramifications of a unilateral takedown of the communications of a head of state – particularly the precedent it sets. They will likely continue their fight until they've setup their own alternatives to SV-based infrastructure.

Cabal 6y ago

> Parler was a hate site, filled with conspiracy theories, radicalization and racism Citation needed. Neither I nor my friends or acquaintances used it for any of these things. Hell, I've hired people off of Parler.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

Grimm1 6y ago

Parler may sue to have their site reinstated, which they are, I don't see an issue here. If these companies were wrong to take them down the courts will force these companies to reverse it. I don't think they will though because multiple posts, comments etc on Parler apparently match the criteria for incitement which Parler insufficiently moderated and is not covered by 1st Amendment rights.

agloeregrets 6y ago

> 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? I find it ironic that the ban is what makes people think the techCos are controlling society rather than the fact that all actions of social networks and hosting services impact society. Like the time when FB make some news feeds more negative to track impact and engagement. Or how the radicalization of users on FB can happen due to the Algo. Ultimately this is a legislative failure, but it also is how a free market should defend itself of dangerous content as well. (keep in mind a Civil war 2 isn't exactly great for the economy). What is wild is that the laws for this all exist and are in use. The behavior here is the use of Section 230 as designed. The definition of insurrection and hate speech are all defined. Clearly what has happened is actually late action by social platforms rather than overreach as the US Gov lacks any mode to actually take on this content.

bigmattystyles 6y ago

I'm in the same boat as you - I'm glad parler is gone but I go back and forth on the implications of the ability of a few to silence so many - the most reasonable way I've come to think of it is if David Duke (huge racist scumbag) suddenly wanted to go on CNN and speak for an hour once a week - should CNN let him? You wouldn't think twice about it, you'd likely think - why would CNN have to comply? It's not a perfect analogy, but that's the best way I've been able to think of it. In the end, it's lose-lose for non fascists. While we're all debating whether there was overreach and or if it should be mitigated, actual fascists are regrouping and planning their next assault.

GcVmvNhBsU 6y ago
Are they actually being silenced, as in someone is forcing them to not express their thoughts? Can they not congregate together the old fashioned way and have as much free speech as they want?

grahamburger 6y ago

> in an ideal world, we have laws applied even handedly to deal with this We have laws protecting people from discrimination based on race, sexuality, etc. A grocery store can't refuse to serve people by race. Maybe we should expand these protected classes and make sure they apply to Internet businesses as well. I don't think we will (or should) expand them in such a way that Parler would be included, though.

briandear 6y ago

> Parler was a hate site, filled with conspiracy theories, radicalization and racism And so is Facebook. And Twitter. And YouTube. And so what? If you don’t like that stuff, you are free to not use services that you don’t like.

newacct583 6y ago

> On the other hand, do we really want a handful of unelected billionaires deciding what is acceptable speech Yes? I mean, look where you're posting. HN is very heavily moderated. Check out dang's post history for all the work he has to do. HN has very clear ideas on what speech is "acceptable" and what is not, and they are significantly more complicated than the "don't incite political violence" standard being enforced against Parler. I mean, really. Parler failed to clear even the simplest, most straightforward, most consensus- and norm-driven ideals of how public discourse is supposed to work. And they didn't really get "moderated" any harder than any of us would have. Yet we still have to rally behind them as the standard-bearer for megacorp censorship? Really? Can't we wait for at least a tiny bit of evidence that they're misusing their power first?

Covzire 6y ago

Parler wasn't a hate site. You're parroting far left propaganda.

amanaplanacanal 6y ago
If you don’t moderate that stuff you are going to be tarred by association. I don’t know how you could avoid that.
vladTheInhaler 6y ago
Comments that are acceptable on Parler: "Personally I'm hoping for war I'd love to crush leftist skulls and rip out their spines. Rally your soy boys. Your Pantifa and BLM wannabe gangsters. I'll bath myself is leftist blood and drink from your skullcaps." Comments that are unacceptable on Parler: Pretending to be a cow owned by Devin Nunes
- charly187 6y ago
  What makes you think the former is acceptable on Parler? Are there documented cases where something like that was reported and Parler refused to take it down?
  - vladTheInhaler 6y ago
    You can go ahead and look at any of the 98 examples cited in Amazon's letter to Parler.
    - baobabKoodaa 6y ago
      Didn't Parler remove all of those posts?
throwaway19937 6y ago
Here's a comment with a racial slur on Parler with 25k upvotes. https://www.reddit.com/r/ParlerWatch/comments/ktwmje/this_is_the_type_of_free_speech_parler_accepts/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ParlerWatch/comments/ktwmje/this_is... IMO it's reasonable to consider it a hate site or a site which embraces racist behavior.

dnh44 6y ago

When it comes to issues like these I tend to agree with the sentiment of "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." But this isn't about criminalising speech promoting conspiracy theories, radicalisation, and racism. It's about private entities withdrawing the infrastructure of speech, which obviously gets a lot more complicated to reason about and legislate. I'm mostly okay with Apple and Google removing the app from their stores. I'm slightly less okay with Amazon withdrawing their services. But if Parler ends up reborn on a server running out of someones house or business I would be very much against their utility providers cutting off access. So I guess what I'm saying is that I'm with you and don't quite know what to think about this either. However I do worry that if we're not careful as a society someone posting on HN (or maybe a government approved Facebook group) will eventually say: >The internet 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.

esyir 6y ago
Let's put it a different way then. Imagine right wing dystopia where everything you value is considered bad. Now you try to discuss Gay rights. You can't talk about it on Facebook, nor on any platform, as they ban you instantly. You build your own platform. Aws/gcp/azure ban you there too and kill the whole thing. I'm going to go the next step. Now credit cards and other payment services refuse services as well. Are you supposed to rebuild the entire tech ecosystem that the entire world runs on? Fight through every damn moat along the way? Is this the bar we set here? Its easy to talk free speech for popular speech. It's how people react to unpopular speech that shows their true colours.
- ip26 6y ago
  The 1st means you can't be jailed by the government for discussing gay rights. It doesn't mean private individuals have to humor you. It doesn't even mean they have to listen to you.
  - zaroth 6y ago
    There are other laws than the 1st Amendment that come into play here. The 3 biggest technology companies in the world united in the last two days to shut down an upstart competitor who was, at the time, literally the #1 app on iPhone and Android. So the issue is primarily one of anti-trust laws. Monopolies do not get to arbitrarily and selectively enforce their ToS against competitors; that is an illegal abuse of market power. The tech giants this week seem to have demonstrated that they do in fact hold monopoly power in the market, and are willing to use it to crush a potential competitor. This seems to me to be an unprecedented situation, a likely anti-trust violation, and potentially to the extent that it was a coordinated action by these companies, a violation of RICO statutes. I think it is fair to say that Parler, like every social network, could be used to post hateful messages, or messages advocating violence. GP stated that Parler was a “hate site” but I think it’s more accurate to say that Parler was a site that carried some hateful messages. It was by no means a site formed or designed specifically to carry hate. A corollary that I would raise is a similar standard in copyright infringement. Sites which are designed specifically with the intent of committing copyright infringement are now criminally liable — it has recently become a serious felony to make these kinds of sites. However, site that show a significant non-infringement purpose are not illegal, even if some infringement takes place on their platform. You might recall that YouTube was a site that got its start with rampant copyright infringement, and to this day has a significant amount of infringing material on its servers, but it is not criminally liable, or even civilly liable for that content due to the fact that the site has a significant non-infringement purpose. I think that’s a fair analogy with Parler. If there’s a copyright or public safety issue with a piece of content posted on a social media platform, the law should provide for a takedown procedure against the content, not against the whole platform. The cause of action should be against the poster, not against the entire platform. Nuking the entire platform from orbit is not an appropriate remedy, and in any case should be done through a court of law, not through the actions of a monopolistic cartel.

johncessna 6y ago

I'll simplify the issue for you. Your tribe won out in this particular battle but you're worried that may not always be the case. You should absolutely be worried about that.

drummer 6y ago
That was excellent.

munificent 6y ago

I don't think it's inconsistent to simultaneously believe: * In general, tech companies should be less powerful and monopolistic. * In this specific case, the tech companies used the power they have in a way that is overall beneficial to society. Trump incited a violent insurrection on the US Capitol. If Senators and Representatives had not successfully escaped through tunnels before the rioters got to them, some of them would be dead. The fact that Trump is still in office after that shows that the US absolutely does not have a functioning legislative branch to check Trump's executive power. In the absence of that, we need some entity powerful enough to push back against rising fascism and authoritarianism. I don't like that that power apparently has to be a handful of tech giant companies, but I'll take that (temporarily at least) over the US becoming a right-wing dictatorship.

codekilla 6y ago
This seems fair. > the US absolutely does not have a functioning legislative branch I'm more concerned by this than anything else. In effect this results in calcified government, which can neither regulate tech companies (or anything) effectively, or serve as a check on executive power. People need to start moving to Wyoming and Alaska, yeah the weather sucks.....but we need to redefine 'civic duty'.

nappy-doo 6y ago

It's like a newspaper, with editors deciding which letters to the editor to publish or not. Tech companies are really media companies, it's just that we don't consume dead trees anymore.

mariodiana 6y ago

Parler was not a "hate site." It's a social media platform that chose to take a reactive rather than proactive approach to policing illegal behavior, and experienced the growing pains of an up-and-comer advertising itself as a Twitter alternative that then had to deal with a flood of Twitter refugees during a political crisis. The overwhelming vast majority of the people on Parler were simply normal people tired of what they perceived as a double standard in Twitter's treatment of conservatives as opposed to liberals, and wished to support a competitor.

danielrpa 6y ago

Would Voltaire's famous "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it" apply here? Perhaps we need a better, faster judicial mechanism for taking down "major content". I'm not saying the government is a great solution for this problem, but IMHO it beats the status quo until we can find a better system.

ip26 6y ago
Your right to say it (& not be jailed) Not your right to be provided an audience
- srveale 6y ago
  Exactly. Can you demand to be broadcast by your local TV station? Can you demand that your letter be published by your newspaper? The right to a platform has never been guaranteed. The only difference is that with social media, your message is broadcast first and moderated after.
  - danielrpa 6y ago
    Interesting examples - both Newspapers and TV Stations, for their public "platform" nature, don't enjoy certain libel protections that Social Media does. FB's "platform" feature is largely listener-driven. You can still use FB and not listen to persons X, Y and Z. It's all posted by users, and users decide what to follow or read (except paid content). Not like TV Stations and Newspapers. That's what Social Media companies have been telling us for a while! But if we want apply usual standards of platform rights and responsibilities to FB, we should then require it to also be responsible for what's posted there. You can't have it both ways.

yourapostasy 6y ago

As much as some of the Parler content was definitely awful, I've seen much worse on dialup BBS's and during the Great Cognitive Corruption of Usenet that started in the 80's and greatly accelerated onwards from there. I'm more troubled by the total cessation of infrastructure as the mitigation of choice, rather than a temporary pause of services. During the pause, work with law enforcement to identify those specific posts that satisfy the Brandenberg "imminent" criteria, mark those as redacted, then return to service. Leaving open possible further work with law enforcement to share a feed and tie in redaction by future judicial decisions. I'm hoping I missed where it says that Parler was offered this choice and turned it down. I'm even more troubled by the continued "let them eat cake" dismissive ennui of the chattering classes to the natural-world plights of the most radicalized members of the Trump supporters (and for that matter, to BLM supporters' plights treatment by other chattering classes), as they're pretty much at the "nothing left to lose" stage. Having been not simply ignored since the 70's onwards, but jeered at, derided, and mocked, instead of rehabilitating their life situations, has driven them into the arms of malign ideologies that openly lie to them fealty will improve their lot in life, when no other ideology will have them. Just like in my enterprise work with my clients, when I hear extreme dissatisfaction, that's an opportunity for me to listen, empathize, then work together iteratively to solve problems. Instead, the US treats such expressions as opportunities to suppress. That only guarantees the pressure builds up elsewhere you cannot predict (in enterprise work, it often manifests as political chits being called in, and budget found where none was found before to completely pivot away and build the users' own solution, however imperfect it may be). The US treats many of its have-nots (all along the political spectrum and not just along one vector) like it treats its prisoners. Brutalize with platitude-laden inaction instead of rehabilitate. It's no wonder the nation manufactures a dictatorship-loving consent.

tjr225 6y ago
I keep seeing this sentiment pop up here on HN and I've come at it in other posts. All of the Trump supporters I know are upper middle class suburbanites who have been fairly well off for quite a while. Not sure I have any empathy for the contempt at all. I just don't buy this sob story what-so-ever. I feel even less bad for violent extremists that have zero goals or demands except to destabilize everything because they believe whatever they see on the internet. There is no ideology for them to defend; only their right to hate. They only want the ability to have whatever they believe to be true to be the case even when it is not the case. Ironically, if the people who were truly destitute and down-trodden could find some way to ignore the superficial partisanship that they've been sold and unite under social and economic policy we might have an actual movement on our hands. Unfortunately they've all been convinced that their superficial differences aren't superficial at all and that the other side is wrong; now it appears at any cost.

dionian 6y ago

> Parler was a hate site, What evidence do you base this on? Do you have evidence quantifying how Parler users are more hateful than Twitter or Facebook?

arbitrage 6y ago

Hi friend. You don't need to dither over hate speech. It's okay.

dragonwriter 6y ago

> Overall it feels like a legislative failure - in an ideal world, we have laws applied even handedly to deal with this. Whether it will be applied even-handedly remains to be seen, but there is a law to deal with this, and I suspect it's a factor in why businesses of all kinds are running screaming from anything connected to the attacks (including other businesses that fail to themselves cut off any activity with a nexus to the attack, the attackers, and the apparent planning for future attacks): 18 USC Sec 2339A, which makes it a federal crime to knowingly provide any goods or services except medicine and religious materials connected to any of an enumerated list of federal criminal offenses collectively designated “terrorism”, punishable by fines and imprisonment for up to 15 years unless death occurs as a result of the crime, in which case the imprisonment becomes for any term of years or life.

acomjean 6y ago
There are laws, but as a practical matter they aren't enforced. Individuals are not held responsible for the threats and illegal speech they make. Look at all the threats made against people on social media. The fact that there is almost no accountability means it keeps happening. The only repercussions most of the time is that the platform kicks you off. Part of it is, its their platform and from a business perspective having you around if you are too toxic isn't wise. It seems like a society problem. Non enforcement and a lot of people with nothing to loose.

intended 6y ago

I’d go a step higher, the normative framework that informs our legislation is old and needs to be examined. We support a market place of ideas because, it was argued that bad ideas would eventually be trumped by better ideas - only by examining bad ideas would we be able to move past them. Part of that remains true today, but it does not account for the realities of mass communication. The model ends up painting a passive, solitary image of ideas. But ideas are neither passive, nor without context. Signal without context is noise. Nor are brains neutral processors of information, they are vulnerable to psyops, malformed arguments, pressure, ignorance and emotion. I have read propaganda, I have seen arguments which sound legitimate, but underlying it is xenophobia and hatred. I know for a fact, that Popper was right and you cannot tolerate the intolerant. They do not come to discuss or exchange ideas. They come to use your platform as an opportunity to gain followers. And they use the gaps in our norms to create space for themselves. Counter speech is not a panacea, it require conditions to work. If those conditions are not satisfied, the strategy fails. The norms behind modern speech need to account for these trade offs. The status quo comes with the trade off that partisanship will increase, more people will be radicalized. This is the trade off, and people have to decide if they are willing to enjoy this trade off.

c54 6y ago

We can empower democratic institutions like the FTC to be able to take action in these cases, rather than leaving important decisions in the hands of private corporations. > ...what Parler is doing should be illegal, because it should be responsible on product liability terms for the known outcomes of its product, aka violence. ... But what Parler is doing is not illegal, because Section 230 means it has no obligation for what its product does.... Similarly, what these platforms did in removing Parler should be illegal, because they should have a public obligation to carry all customers engaging in legal activity on equal terms. But it’s not illegal, because there is no such obligation. These are private entities operating public rights of way, but they are not regulated as such. [0] https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/a-simple-thing-biden-can-do-to-reset https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/a-simple-thing-biden-can-...

trianglem 6y ago
Absolutely not. That sounds like Soviet nonsense.

Animats 6y ago

Parler.com is down too. It's been removed from DNS. DNS server is EPIK.COM ("Resilient domains"). Their DNS server is returning 0.0.0.0, instead of NXDOMAIN. The domain is still on Verisign, and they don't seem to be doing anything to it.

trianglem 6y ago
Epik.com the refuge of far-right, neo-nazi sites led by Rob Monster epik? Of course it is.

claudiulodro 6y ago

> 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? Parler was co-founded by an unelected billionaire as a "grassroots" way for the Mercers to push their ideology and their version of "acceptable speech". I don't really have any qualms with their power play getting shut down, and I don't think other businesses should be forced to support it.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

millbraebart 6y ago

Would this law also apply to LeBron James when he “incites” black youth by claiming black people “are hunted everyday” by the police? A fact check would show the statistics don’t support such a claim. It’s clearly dangerous speech that needs to be moderated. Why does the left assume nobody has any agency over their own actions?

kofejnik 6y ago

Russia's censorship laws are formulated around 'preventing religious and ethnic hatred' (among other things).

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

slapshot 6y ago

My concern is not that AWS should be forced to host content they don't want. It's that AWS (and Apple, Facebook, and others) have misrepresented what they do. It's no shock that DailyKos shouldn't have to host pro-Trump content. Nor should /theDonald have to host pro-Bernie content. We all agree that people can choose who to associate with, and that free association is important. But AWS (and Facebook and others) didn't say "we're sites that present only one kind of content" the way /theDonald and DailyKos did. They presented themselves as universal tools for people to express themselves, build their own sites, install apps, etc. So it comes as a shock when AWS says "we actually only want to support sites that present views that Jeff Bezos thinks are reasonable." And when Apple says "you can only download apps on your phone that we think do a good enough job moderating." And when Facebook bans people for posting wrong opinions. The government can't and probably shouldn't force AWS to host content that Bezos doesn't agree with. It would be Amazon's right to host only content that is pro-Trump, or equally Amazon's right to only host content that is anti-Trump. But when Amazon presents something as a neutral utility but secretly enforces different rules, we can and should criticize them. That's true even if all the content being removed today is garbage. I haven't seen any "worthwhile" content that's been affected by the recent moves, and I have never heard of any valuable speech on Parler. But I am still concerned that Apple gets to decide what apps I can install on my phone because they don't like the content. For every Apple (managed in California by socially liberal periople) there's a Walmart (managed in Arkansas by social conservatives) that will take the same powers and use them in a different way. Walmart is legally free to remove pro-BLM books from their online bookshelves, but we can and should criticize them if they do.

gyudin 6y ago
I feel like erotic, kink and LGBTQ+ communities got hit with all the new rules. Over the last few years they've been kicked out of Tumblr, now Instagram, Twitch and Youtube aren't really happy with non PG13 content, Apple refusing to publish Fetlife app for years or Onlyfans, Pornhub deleting all content from non-partners and so on... Honestly feels like just companies are trying to maximize their profits and "don't be evil" became just an old memory.

b0bb1z3r0 6y ago

You can still say what you want. It’s just harder to say DIVISIVE HATEFUL RACIST INCITING VIOLENCE against blank. (Caps because I don’t have italics on phone, not yelling). I control what’s on my private network. Issue is people “want” to use these networks to spread their “#%$&£x” to the largest audience. These bad faith arguments, because you can’t come to “my house” and cause your trouble. No you don’t have that right. Do it at “your house”. Can someone explain how Twitter/Amazon/Apple/Google owe me?

loceng 6y ago

They aren't deciding what free speech is acceptable, they're deciding what free speech is acceptable on their private platforms. People are pretending like the platforms that deplatformed the group inciting violence are the only platforms on the internet that they could have used, they're not - they're not monopolies in regards to that. They are however the most convenient platforms to use because of various reasons, however we're not talking about having a right to convenience - we're talking about having the right to free speech, which everyone still does in America and on the internet. Some advice: if you're going to have a mob boss and wannabe tyrant like Trump and rally your followers on a platform, I'd recommend using, depending on, technology layers of owners who are aligned with you and okay with inciting of violence; Trump goes on Fox News to say whatever the fuck he wants to millions of people while saying he's being prevented from free speech - come on now people, let's come back to reality and stop getting sucked into the gaslighting.

exporectomy 6y ago
Your definition of monopoly is wrong. Microsoft was judged by the court to be abusing its monopoly power by bundling IE with Windows and making it difficult to uninstall even though users could still install competing browsers if they spent the extra effort. There's no natural monopoly that you can't find an alternative to if you're willing to spend enough effort.
- loceng 6y ago
  That's not a comparable example.

liberal_098 6y ago

IF we proceed from the hypothesis that X is "a hate site, filled with conspiracy theories, radicalization and racism" AND we want to ban the whole platform X, THEN it would be logical to ban also all the layers down the technological stack: AWS, Google Play Store, Telecoms that transported the traffic etc. Indeed, X platform has approximately the same responsibility as other platform layers and hence they all should be punished. Another idea is to punish them proportionally to their ability to check the content published on the platform so that telecoms probably will not be punished at all because they are not able to read encrypted traffic.

darkarmani 6y ago
Ban the least layers needed to achieve the goal. The layers closer to the violent speech get the most responsibility. If the next layer refuses to ban the previous layer, then yes: keep going after the next layer in the stack.

charly187 6y ago

"just like I wouldn't bat an eye for AWS taking down an ISIS recruitment site, I don't really see any loss here." There were about 10 million people on Parler before it was taken down. If you really think its comporable to an ISIS recruitment site, we got a much, much bigger problem here.

mcguire 6y ago

I suspect the bottom line is that general anonymity on the internet needs to be discarded. No, wait, hear me out. No moderation isn't acceptable. Really. (If someone wants to make a counter-assertion, I merely point to this site.) Non-transparent, corporate moderation doesn't seem palatable to anyone. There are just too many pitfalls. Independent moderation falls apart when you consider that different fora have different moderation requirements. (A forum for Cinderblock the obese cat is going to be very different from any kind of political or technical site.) The best case seems to me to be case-by-case, transparent moderation with precedents, similar to common law. And ultimately, I expect transparent moderation to, in the extreme, go to the court system, so that's not necessarily a bad starting point. Unfortunately, that falls apart when large numbers of participants are (including, say, moderators) are not speaking in good faith. I see two possible ideas to address that: First, to tie accounts to physical identities (but not necessarily disallowing the account to be effectively anonymous), to cut the number of bots, multiple accounts, etc. Second, to attach an account to a user's reputation (which does break anonymity). The results I see are to cut down on the volume of crap while ensuring users have skin in the game (with a side order of making legal action against stalking, harassment, and threats). But what about those situations that require anonymity? Most of those already have legal and social protections: psychological, religious, and legal counseling, for example. I would support anonymity for those fora, which places responsibility for moderation on the fora, of course, as well as meaning that the moderation cannot be transparent. One area does require special handling: whistleblowing. It does require anonymity, and does not have any current legal or social protections. That needs to be fixed. But anyway, as a general rule, the default for social media should not support anonymity. The only way to free providers like Facebook, Reddit, this site, or AWS from responsibility for what is posted there is to place that responsibility on the actual posters---having no responsibility doesn't work, and giving that power to the discretion of the owner of the provider isn't acceptable. There are some objections that I think I can answer, but this comment is getting too long for me, so I'll wait until anyone cares. And no, the irony of Parler's requirement of photo-ids and (allegedly) SSNs isn't lost on me.

bnlmx 6y ago
> but not necessarily disallowing the account to be effectively anonymous With the average opsec of chat sites, would you bet on "effectively"? Ironically Parler itself just had a leak. Even if a company currently has good opsec, it can be acquired and go downhill (or turn evil). In the current climate, this comment could (and would) be construed as implicit support of Parler, with all the consequences. The rich left loves "consequences", except for themselves.

kolbe 6y ago

> On the other hand, do we really want a handful of unelected billionaires deciding what is acceptable speech Elected billionaires (and millionaires/thousandaires) don't do much better.

dogman144 6y ago

> 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? Putting aside questions around whether or not a media filter has always existed in some form... You're using social media hosted on EC2 instances that can be terminated vs instead of your local newspaper and other similar, less directly filtered options. That's the trade off. I don't really see anything unusual about it - a newspaper could fire a writer (or even hire writers that reflect a certain tone), and nobody batted an eye.

downrightmike 6y ago

It is the same thing when they take down any other hate site: bye bye haters. Intolerance cannot be allowed to be free speech. Just like you can't walk into a club and yell fire without consequences. We have tragic historical events that set precedence.

skrebbel 6y ago
> Intolerance cannot be allowed to be free speech. That's just "I'm for free speech unless I disagree with the speech", right? Who decides what's too intolerant? We all love our Popper quotes but it's a very hard line to draw. Nearly any opinion can be explained at being somehow intolerant if you try hard enough.
- downrightmike 6y ago
  Pretty much either you agree that Nazis are bad and those that are like them, regardless of the time period are also bad, or you're an idiot. Hate, violence, threats based there upon, are pretty cut and dry.
  - skrebbel 6y ago
    The world sure is simpler with those black and white glasses on, isn't it!
    - downrightmike 6y ago
      The whole do on to others as you would have them do on to you is not a new concept. And act like a terrorist and do terrorist acts, makes you a terrorist. And we don't support them. In the end if you want to hate people because it makes you feel better, sure go ahead, just keep your mouth shut and don't act.

2OEH8eoCRo0 6y ago

I believe the market will work it out. They overuse this power there will be consequences/outcry. We can figure it out when we get there. I'm not worried about any slippery slope.

hintymad 6y ago

I don't know why it's right to ban conspiracies. Conspiracies are to be debunked, not banned. Otherwise, people who believe such conspiracies simply go underground and we end up cultivating anger, distrust, and cynicism. Is that covid-19 would turn into a global pandemic back in Feb a conspiracy? Is criticizing USSR in the 30s a conspiracy? Is that earth is not the center of our universe a conspiracy 700 years ago? Is that FBI's infiltration and surveillance on political groups a conspiracy? Are all the questioning on the reasons for the US to invade Iraq conspiracy theories? Where are the WMDs now? In general, are we sure that no conspiracy ever turned out to be true? How many heresies turned out to be correct and changed the course of our history? And how many people were persecuted in the name of spreading conspiracy? Why are we so afraid of conspiracies?

JKCalhoun 6y ago
> I don't know why it's right to ban conspiracies. Conspiracies are to be debunked, not banned. No one is threatening to kill an elected official over grassy knolls. Times change.
- hintymad 6y ago
  That’s hate speech, and it’s illegal to threaten a person with death. It’s different from banning conspiracy theory
markkanof 6y ago
Right. It's frustrating that the term conspiracy theory has become a blunt weapon that can be used to quickly dismiss allegations of wrong doing and paint the accuser as a fringe lunatic. Sometimes people do evil things or conspire with others to do evil things (see Tuskegee experiments, Epstein, etc.). Just because someone doesn't currently have irrefutable proof that something happened doesn't mean that they shouldn't be able to talk about it.
eigenrick 6y ago
Most of the modern, big conspiracies have been thoroughly debunked, but that doesn't stop their spread. Any flat-earther has heard all of the flat-earth debunking. Sadly, I know a handful of flat-earthers, and I tried arguing for a while, but it does no good. Instead it appears that the theorists double-down on the conspiracy. I think people believe in conspiracies, not because they're mislead on a certain topic, but because they want to believe. So debunking conspiracies is attacking their faith, which is what causes zealotry. It's more like spreading a religion, which, yeah, you can't really ban it. You just have to let people do their thing. tl;dr I agree that one shouldn't censor it, but only because it does no good.

f430 6y ago

> Parler was a hate site Have you seen Twitter, Reddit? It's filled with hate, conspiracy, radicalization and racism. It's astounding how quickly people fall back to their dfault political leanings and stop being objective. If they can do this to Parler citing politically motivated excuse to shut them down, what stops your company from getting booted off the internet because some of your users posted "lets blow stuff up"? This sets a dangerous precedent going forward and it affects all of us regardless of your political spectrum. I get that AWS is an independent commercial entity that has its own terms but do you realize the problem of trusting billionaires and their monopoly to always do the right thing? Tomorrow, the currents might change, and it could be you too. First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist....

zmmmmm 6y ago
That's where I think people are missing the point to some extent. I'm taking on good faith what was reported by these companies - but their statements claimed they observed actual concrete planning to organise actual violence and further insurrection. Stopping speech is one thing. But the claim is it is not the speech they are worried about, it is the violence. The infrastructure is being used for more than speech. Removing the infrastructure is being done to impede those larger effects. Does it change the flavor if I rewrite the phrase as First they came for the murderers and I did not speak out ... ?
- f430 6y ago
  Facebook and Twitter has been used to organize violence and overthrow governments too.
  - zmmmmm 6y ago
    I don't think an argument of consistency really works here. Sure that has happened. And possibly in those countries they suffered consequences for their part in that. That does not mean they should not apply those principles in the US, in this instance. All these things are context specific, driven by judgement taking into account the whole circumstances.

cmiles74 6y ago

In my opinion, things are working as expected. The US federal and state level governments are not supposed to regulate speech, per the US Constitution. In this case they are not regulating speech. Private companies are regulating speech (in their applications, through their services and websites, etc.) as they are free to do under the US Constitution. While there may be a market for the speech Parler promotes and amplifies that market is not sufficiently large (in the opinion of these companies) to offset possible bad public relations or the loss of other customers. I don't think there's any place for legislation that forces private companies to take a loss in this manner. It's clearly anti-free market and definitely anti-free speech, forcing Amazon to associate with speech they feel might harm the companies financial outlook. Also, is it necessary? There are many BitTorrent tracker sites that are treated as illegal in the US and are still available. If Parler was really dedicated to keeping their website running they could surely do so. Maybe they won't have applications in the Apple App Store but that's not a right, is it? You have to have product that Apple feels helps the overall goal of their App Store, which is to make money for Apple.

rootsudo 6y ago
"Private companies are regulating speech (in their applications, through their services and websites, etc.) as they are free to do under the US Constitution. " Technically, there is no barrier that restricts a corporation from granting free space, so it isn't "free" to do so, moreso that it was not addressed because at the time of the framing of the constitution, the bigger dissenters of free speech were government, and religion, backed by government (or being the government.)
- cmiles74 6y ago
  I disagree that this was an oversight of the of the US Constitution. Newspapers and books were both things when the US Constitution was written and, in all the years since, we haven't seen any amendments that would force a newspaper to print articles or letters that might cost them customers. Publishers are not forced to publish books that they feel might tarnish or otherwise harm their brands. Indeed, it's my position that such laws would in fact be infringing on the free speech of those private companies. In addition they might cost those companies money, making these hypothetical laws also anti-free market.

flowerlad 6y ago

> do we really want a handful of unelected billionaires deciding what is acceptable speech Historically newspapers, television and radio have decided what is acceptable to be published through their media. There is no reason modern internet-based media should be any different. On the internet everything can appear equally legitimate. Breitbart looks as legit as the BBC. Sacha Baron Cohen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymaWq5yZIYM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymaWq5yZIYM Excerpts: Voltaire was right when he said "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." And social media lets authoritarians push absurdities to millions of people. President Trump using Twitter has spread conspiracy theories more than 1700 times to his 67 million followers. Freedom of speech is not freedom of reach. Sadly There will always be racists, misogynists, anti-Semites, and child abusers. We should not be giving bigots and pedophiles a free platform to amplify their views and target their victims. Zuckerberg says people should decide what's credible, not tech companies. When 2/3rds of millennials have not heard of Auschwitz how are they supposed to know what's true? There is such a thing as objective truth. Facts do exist.

baryphonic 6y ago

> 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. (I'm going to leave aside the unfounded assertion that Parler was a "hate site." If it is, then every popular website is a "hate site," from Facebook and Google all the way down. Scores of prominent people who aren't hateful but for bizarre Left-wing constructions of the word "hate" use Parler to communicate with millions of people who are themselves not hateful conspiracy theorists.) I always feel there's an unjustified logical jump on the part of authoritarian sentiments such as this. The argument seems to be, "X hosts hateful content that it refuses to remove. If we remove X, then we will have reduced hate." This doesn't make much sense. Has anyone's mind actually changed because of Parler? It makes even less sense for conspiracy theories, where censorship makes conspiracy theorists feel like they're on the right track. I remember looking up some moon landing hoaxer content on YouTube probably five to eight years ago. There was a lot of it on YouTube, but then YouTube also recommended some debunking videos (a few of which had been made specifically in response to the conspiracy theory videos themselves). The debunking videos were just frankly more persuasive. (The only issue with my little experiment was that the "Algorithm" recommended me conspiracy nonsense for a few weeks after.) There were no passive-aggressive, condescending propaganda boxes, no appeals to the authority of the media or legal system, no "fact checks." Just arguments for and against. This is not to say that people can't do bad things with speech. We have stories like a random lynch mob forming in India over a viral series of videos shared via WhatsApp.[1] There are other stories like this. All are appalling. And technology has removed frictions that existed before to keep these things from happening. But let's not forget that the world in which speech is restricted is much, much scarier. The Rwandan genocide of 1994 was perpetrated by the most powerful members of Rwandan society, who used their monstrous power to slaughter Tutsis as well as moderate Hutus who spoke against the killings. In the South under Jim Crow, speech was also violently suppressed with the aid of the states, who turned a blind eye to terrorist groups like the Klan going after black southerners or even white "race traitors" with lynching. "Censorship, but only for the bad stuff" seems to be an unworkable system. People get riled up, and the consequences can be horrific, but they seem worse in a regime with heavy censorship that doesn't allow a safety valve for the bad ideas. [1] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/pranavdixit/whatsapp-destroyed-village-lynchings-rainpada-india https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/pranavdixit/whatsapp-de...

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

riccccccc 6y ago

Lets not forget that Twitter just last month signed a new deal with Amazon to be hosted on AWS. Don't suppose this has anything to do with Amazon booting Twitter's largest competitor from the platform do you? As for hateful rhetoric on Parler, that same hateful rhetoric exists on Twitter as well, don't fool yourself, it is only the fact that it is the left threatening the right that anyone allows it. Remember when Kathy Griffin held the bloody head of the President, or the current rise up and kill cops tweets you find everywhere on Twitter. Or the white people should all be dead tweets? Whether you agree to it or not does not therefore make hate speech. There is no clear cut defined line for hate speech to begin with. Anything can be declared hate speech, hell what I am saying now could be considered hate speech because I actually defend Parler and the people on its right to speech. At least then we can show examples of see this guy right here? He is a moron and believes in really dumb stuff. All they are doing by silencing these people is forcing them deeper underground where even more nefarious ideas and figures lie becoming more radicalized and more violent. But I guess that is what establishment wants, a perpetual idea to scare people with so that they give up even more freedom of thought.

throw0101a 6y ago

> 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? And what did start-ups do before AWS et al? Didn't they 'just': rent a rack, fill it with computers, get an ASN/IP block, and make it accessible by DNS? I understand it's more 'agile' to just spin up instances as needed, but are we in a place that the Old Way can no longer work? (At least theoretically.) Doesn't Stack Overflow (still?) run on their own hardware? * https://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/03/29/stack-overflow-the-hardware-2016-edition/ https://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/03/29/stack-overflow-the-ha...

rodgerd 6y ago

> On the other hand, do we really want a handful of unelected billionaires deciding what is acceptable speech Billionaires like the Mercer family, who fund Parler? You're on a site run as part of the outreach for a VC firm where the owners are best buds with Peter Theil, Facebook board member, early Trump backer, a billionaire who literally hunted for a chance to sue a news organization out of existence because he didn't like a story they wrote about him; a site where a large number of the companies they fund and people who comment are intimately involved with AdTech and/or social media. And you're only now noticing that billionaires have an unreasonable sway on discourse? You didn't notice that not only does Rupert Murdoch own print press, book publishing, an TV all over the English-speaking world? You didn't notice the Mercer family also setting up Cambridge Analytica and being principal backers of Brexit?