31 ms·

I've been trying to come to grips with the societal impact of echo chambers, "hate" speech, and the obligations vs. rights of sites and hosting providers. So f

I've been trying to come to grips with the societal impact of echo chambers, "hate" speech, and the obligations vs. rights of sites and hosting providers. So far, my take is that websites have less obligation than hosting. It concerns me that AWS booted a site off their platform for speech issues - I am leaning more and more to the idea that colos, IaaS and ISPs should be considered common carriers, and that only a court order should get a site booted off the web entirely.

klmadfejno 6y ago
> It concerns me that AWS booted a site off their platform for speech issues They booted Parler off for violence issues. One may personally disagree about where to draw that blurry line, but I think there's more than enough plausible deniability here. This is not the trigger of a grand slippery slope. If Amazon drops a company purely for non-violent political differences, by all means, lets raise those pitchforks.
- mensetmanusman 6y ago
  Apparently mostly facebook was used, not parler.
  - klmadfejno 6y ago
    Sure, maybe? Doesn't mean parler wasn't a toxic violent place. If you want to hold facebook to a higher standard, by all means, I agree.
  - snoshy 6y ago
    This smacks of whataboutism to me. No doubt Facebook hosted large amounts of this activity, but it does not negate the fact that Parler did so as well. Amazon's court filing detailed hundreds of incidents that they had given Parler months to fix.
    - oh_sigh 6y ago
      Crying "whataboutism" is just a meme-y way to shutdown claims of hypocrisy. Husband: Two glasses of white wine in one night honey? You need to cut back for your health's sake Wife: But dear, you drink a handle of vodka every night and have refused any attempts at intervention. Husband: A-ha, classic whataboutism edit: I'd love to respond to the people below me, but HN has decided that one post an hour is too much (despite having a 10 year old account and 4000+ karma)
      - snoshy 6y ago
        Facebook isn't even a party in this legal proceeding. The only ones are the court, Amazon, and Parler. Facebook could commit genocide tomorrow, and it would not affect this lawsuit.
      - joshuamorton 6y ago
        Where's the hypocrisy? Should AWS drop facebook as a customer? I don't think anyone is suggesting that Facebook is free of guilt, but there is evidence that Facebook does at least try to keep their site clean, and for the most part they do. Its certainly possible that Facebook had (in absolute terms) more violence and planning than Parler, but as a percentage of the overall content, it's much smaller. This doesn't excuse Facebook, they can do better, but it isn't hypocritical to say "the group with 10% violent content that tacitly encourages it isn't okay, while the group with .1% violent content that actively innovates in trying to keep things clean is okay". Of course, that's only true if FB is actively innovating, and, well, that's questionable (Yann Lecun has made some concerning statements about Facebook's role, or lack thereof, in radicalization).
        takeda 6y ago
        Facebook and Twitter also have their own data centers, so it's not like AWS had to chose between Facebook, Parler or Twitter.
  - ojnabieoot 6y ago
    Wait till you hear what us leftists want to do with Facebook! I will say that my preferred solution to the problem of Facebook (nationalization and open criminal investigations into its leadership) actually raises serious constitutional issues. The Parler case really really doesn’t - it doesn’t even raise good philosophical issues about free speech, just a bunch of dumb arguments.
    - repeatafterme1 6y ago
      I would like to hear.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - duskwuff 6y ago
    You're conflating two different issues. Some of the specific, concrete planning of violence may have taken place on Facebook. That doesn't appear to have been taking place as much on Parler -- possibly because it was less private -- but there was plenty of generally violent rhetoric on Parler, just less specific. "We should kill this person" (Parler) versus "Let's all meet up with our guns here" (Facebook).
  - cma 6y ago
    But what percentage of Facebook activity was used for it within getting moderated vs what percentage of parler activity?
- throwawayboise 6y ago
  These things always start with moves that sound completely reasonable. Only time will tell if they expand their moderation demands.
  - klmadfejno 6y ago
    Sure. And yet, completely reasonable things overwhelmingly tend not to lead to extreme outcomes. Only time will tell, but the point is that this is hardly an urgent warning sign.
    - svachalek 6y ago
      Indeed, this line of thinking is known as the Slippery Slope Fallacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope
  - multjoy 6y ago
    What are these things, specifically?
    - Y-bar 6y ago
      > First they came for the nazis and qanon extremists threatening democracy, and I said nothing because fuck those people, they are the reason this verse exists.
      - klmadfejno 6y ago
        I would note, the original line is something along the lines of "i did nothing because I wasn't one of them". The line genuinely doesn't hold up as especially powerful when its "I did nothing because they self identify as a hate group against people like me"
  - aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA 6y ago
    So, stop doing completely reasonable things then?
- zamalek 6y ago
  > They booted Parler off for violence issues. It baffles me how often violence issues become conflated with speech issues. You are absolutely correct, this is a violence issue. America has likely the most free speech protections in the world, but fighting words (violence) are not protected. There is a huge amount of precdent to support Amazon's actions here, dating back decades. Furthermore, just because Facebook did nothing is no reason for Amazon to sit idly by doing nothing. Is the advocation for Amazon to become another bystander? Is the superior situation to have all platforms supporting and enabling insurrection and possible sedition? Get off it. Amazon can make the right choice irrespective of their peers making the worst choice.
  - fjabre 6y ago
    If that's true then pretty much every social media platform today should be banned from AWS.
  - Blikkentrekker 6y ago
    Because violence to advance a cause the powers agree with is suddenly protected under free speech all the same. Many have pointed out that the storming of the capitol was not too dissimilar to many of the b.l.m. riots which were also often coördinated and featured chants of killing police officers. And it very much seems that whichever side one be on very much dictates how both are treated with both sides claiming that it is about violence irrespective of speech, but it's quite clear that the tolerance for violence is quite a bit lower when it concern an ideology one does not agree with.
    - klmadfejno 6y ago
      The sentiment you're trying to express here is empathy. There is more empathy for people protesting racial injustice and the murder of minority groups than there is for people waving hate group symbols and trying to kill political leaders. I don't see a need to demand a system void of empathy. It's not a one side issue. It's not right vs. left. In the case of parler, it's largly Nazi vs. not Nazi, and that's a particularly easy case to judge. Parler does not represent conservative America, even if the extremists at the rally claim otherwise. It represents a mix of violent hate groups and conspiracy theorists. The small proportion of BLM activists that were actively violent do not represent liberal America. Everyone has a choice. Everyone identifying as conservative can point at the white supremacists in DC and say "Those are my people" or "Those are not my people".
JeremyBanks 6y ago
If you choose to just call it "speech issues", it sounds worrying, but when you're a little more precise, "shutting them down for failing to remove calls for violence including many instances pointed out to them directly by Amazon's lawyers" sounds pretty reasonable.
OniBait 6y ago
I would suspect that it would give Twitter pause about hosting anything in AWS. But I doubt that is the case because there seems to have been a pretty clear-cut case of collusion between Twitter, Apple, Google and Amazon to silence Trump by any means possible.
ojnabieoot 6y ago
I am very sympathetic to the idea that ISPs should be common carriers, but definitely not colos and platforms like AWS. Let’s use an old-fashioned analogy. An ISP is like a post office, and people’s letters should not be meddled with (outside of violent threats or pursuant to a legal criminal investigation). In particular, ISPs are relevant to most individuals and ISPs (should) have respect for individual rights. But large platforms like AWS are more like large-scale mail printing and distribution, and is only really relevant to commercial enterprises. Such companies might choose to work with Sears to distribute catalogs, but decide not to work with Scientologists to distribute propaganda. They can be judicious in their choice of business partners without violating any individual rights - nobody has a right to any commercial partner they want. And in this case, AWS’s freedom of association rights (deciding not to do business with groups that aren’t federally protected, like the racist trolls who run Parler) are much more relevant here. AWS refusing to do business with Parler is not the same thing as Comcast refusing to allow access to things written by Parler’s users. It is more like Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing refusing to put racist screeds in an ebook.
- echelon 6y ago
  If we had a fully P2P and distributed architecture for information exchange, this wouldn't be a problem. As it stands, we choose centralized websites and platforms to be how we exchange information. They're an essential ingredient in the "common carrier" recipe. How can your parents share messages without Comcast + Facebook?
  - vlunkr 6y ago
    We choose to use centralize platforms out of convenience, but if Facebook magically disappeared, people would immediately move to one of the many alternatives.
    - echelon 6y ago
      That's not a counter argument to what I've said. It's a platitude that I think everyone agrees on. You don't even need to conjure "magical disappearance". Social networks often come and go as fads. YikYak, Snapchat, TikTok. The thesis of what I said is that P2P mechanics are largely invariant of and shielded from business decisions, social mores, etc. We should consider building more P2P things.
bob33212 6y ago
There are two separate issues: 1. Is it good that a few people at a few large companies can decide what is and isn't acceptable speech in America. 2. Do media companies have the right to end business relationships with companies who they feel violate their contracts and Terms of Service. The obvious answer to #2 is yes. Otherwise you would be forcing Fox News to run adds calling all Fox News viewers racists, and forcing MSNBC to run adds with racial slurs in them. There isn't a clear answer to #1.Do these people have a conflict of interest? Who would do a better job? Biden? Trump?
- richardARPANET 6y ago
  3. Corporations and the government are MERGING in the USA. Biden just hired a tonne of ex-big tech staff to work on tech oversight policy, lol.
- rodgerd 6y ago
  > 1. Is it good that a few people at a few large companies can decide what is and isn't acceptable speech in America. Sure, but that's not like it's a new issue. And while I'm not suggesting you personally are raising it in bad faith, it's quite striking how much of the discourse - and I use that word in the broadest possible sense - on HN has appeared only after a pro-facist social media site lost its hosting, from folks who don't seem to have been concerned with, or even aggressively in favour of, companies banning "woke politics", or the constrol the Murdoch family exert over discourse in the English speaking world, and so on. Like sure, there's a legitimate social issue there, but most of the posting here just reinforces Satre.
  - bob33212 6y ago
    I think you are conflating multiple groups. There is a group of people tired of woke culture invading their workspace. There is another group of people who are in a Pro-Trump bubble and believe that the election was stolen. There is another group of "libertarian / free speech" ideologues. There is another group who are surprised that a US President who had just received 74 million votes was "silenced" by big tech. My guess is that most of the concern you see on HN is from people in the last group that are afraid of what it means for society if a President can be cancelled. Personally, I think that their concern is overblown because Trump wasn't silenced he is just too lazy to take the time to come up with another messaging plan. I assume he is still on Twitter under a fake name hurling insults out at everyone.
xoa 6y ago
>It concerns me that AWS booted a site off their platform for speech issues I'm sorry for the caps but you and a host of others are forgetting something repeatedly and it's getting fairly annoying: AMAZON HAS FREE SPEECH RIGHTS TOO. Just as Parler does, and you do, and I do, and Twitter does, and the various owners and employees of these organizations do, and on and on. It's Free Speech all the way down. And a fundamental aspect of Free Speech isn't just the right to say something, it's necessarily the right to NOT say something, and to NOT provide material support against your will to speech you disagree with. If you or I or anyone else or any general organization decides to NOT provide help to someone else's speech, be it our own direct voice or access to our private property, that's not censorship that is itself Free Speech. They in turn have the right to complain, and to exercise their own freedom of association, and we may change our minds, or not, and others can chime in, and on and on forever. Free Speech is a system not an end goal, a constant churning that hopefully over long enough timescales will give us a better grasp of Truth. When government uses force, that halts the system, and speech becomes frozen. History and present indicates that the bar for that, though not infinite, should be quite high. Some companies that truly have natural monopolies or exercise quasi-governmental power may fall into that too, particularly if they in some way are significantly making use of government power themselves (limited spectrum allocation for cellular carriers for example, or physical infrastructure companies making use of public rights of way). But social and economic censure is a fundamental aspect of the process of Free Speech. 3rd parties aren't some disembodied Other, they're entities that have the same rights as anyone else by default.
- umvi 6y ago
  Should Verizon and T-Mobile have free speech rights too then? Why should they allow literal Nazis to communicate over their infrastructure?
  - xoa 6y ago
    >Should Verizon and T-Mobile have free speech rights too then? Try reading the whole paragraph (emphasis added): >particularly if they in some way are significantly making use of government power themselves (limited spectrum allocation for cellular carriers for example Come on. >Why should they allow literal Nazis to communicate over their infrastructure? Because they're making use of a government granted monopoly on a physically limited common. They should in turn operate as common carriers.
ntsplnkv2 6y ago
There is no material reason why Parler can't host their own hardware, whereas it's unrealistic for someone to start their own ISP.
vlunkr 6y ago
I worked for a very small hosting company and we had to automatically detect and remove bitcoin miners because they were so common, I can't even imagine what AWS deals with. If AWS had to get a court order every time someone tried to do something illegal, or against TOS on their platform, the courts would be flooded immediately.
- umvi 6y ago
  > I worked for a very small hosting company and we had to automatically detect and remove bitcoin miners because they were so common, I can't even imagine what AWS deals with. Huh? Why shouldn't I be able to mine bitcoins on AWS? What's the point of paying to use people's computers if I can't use them for what I want? I pay AWS because I have money and they have servers and I want to pay them money in exchange for using their servers. So if I put a bitcoin miner on there running 24/7, I might rack up a huge bill, but why should Amazon care as long as I have the cash? I'm opposed to the idea that server usage should be morally vetted by the server owner. If something illegal is happening, by all means take it down, but "what you are doing is legal, but we disagree with it so bye bye" is a bad precedent, IMO.
  - vlunkr 6y ago
    Maybe you can on AWS, I don't know, but it's also not the point. The purpose of our service was primarily for web hosting, and it ran on VMs, so one person consuming all the CPU time would negatively impact other customers. It's not that we morally objected, it's that it wasn't the business we wanted to provide, and it was against the TOS. Which is the same conclusion the judge came to in this Parler case.
    - umvi 6y ago
      > so one person consuming all the CPU time would negatively impact other customers So charge them more or limit their compute? If you are in the business of renting out compute resources then you need to spell out what the terms are. It's like renting out your car and then getting mad when someone drives it 2000 miles in one weekend. You need to spell out: "Yep, it's $50 a day, and you get 100 miles per day. Every mile after that is $1. If you want to drive the car further it's $100 per day" not "It's $50 per day unless we don't like what you are doing then we'll revoke the car arbitrarily" > It's not that we morally objected, it's that it wasn't the business we wanted to provide, and it was against the TOS Ok and what was the clause in the ToS they violated? I sure hope it was more specific than the vague arbitrary clause Amazon used to axe Parler.
fjabre 6y ago
I agree with this completely. You just send them further underground. There is no 'but' as people would have you believe here. But they are Nazis. But I don't agree with them. But they cause riots and violence. There's always a 'but'. Only a court order should have the power to shut these sites down and that's only if they present a clear and present danger. This is clearly a cultural cleansing of sorts. I remember other such cultural revolutions. China comes to mind.
tantalor 6y ago
> speech issues When your service is providing a platform for speech, what other issues can there be?
cush 6y ago
Have you seen The Social Dilemma? Shit's terrifying.

klmadfejno 6y ago

> It concerns me that AWS booted a site off their platform for speech issues They booted Parler off for violence issues. One may personally disagree about where to draw that blurry line, but I think there's more than enough plausible deniability here. This is not the trigger of a grand slippery slope. If Amazon drops a company purely for non-violent political differences, by all means, lets raise those pitchforks.

mensetmanusman 6y ago
Apparently mostly facebook was used, not parler.
- klmadfejno 6y ago
  Sure, maybe? Doesn't mean parler wasn't a toxic violent place. If you want to hold facebook to a higher standard, by all means, I agree.
- snoshy 6y ago
  This smacks of whataboutism to me. No doubt Facebook hosted large amounts of this activity, but it does not negate the fact that Parler did so as well. Amazon's court filing detailed hundreds of incidents that they had given Parler months to fix.
  - oh_sigh 6y ago
    Crying "whataboutism" is just a meme-y way to shutdown claims of hypocrisy. Husband: Two glasses of white wine in one night honey? You need to cut back for your health's sake Wife: But dear, you drink a handle of vodka every night and have refused any attempts at intervention. Husband: A-ha, classic whataboutism edit: I'd love to respond to the people below me, but HN has decided that one post an hour is too much (despite having a 10 year old account and 4000+ karma)
    - snoshy 6y ago
      Facebook isn't even a party in this legal proceeding. The only ones are the court, Amazon, and Parler. Facebook could commit genocide tomorrow, and it would not affect this lawsuit.
    - joshuamorton 6y ago
      Where's the hypocrisy? Should AWS drop facebook as a customer? I don't think anyone is suggesting that Facebook is free of guilt, but there is evidence that Facebook does at least try to keep their site clean, and for the most part they do. Its certainly possible that Facebook had (in absolute terms) more violence and planning than Parler, but as a percentage of the overall content, it's much smaller. This doesn't excuse Facebook, they can do better, but it isn't hypocritical to say "the group with 10% violent content that tacitly encourages it isn't okay, while the group with .1% violent content that actively innovates in trying to keep things clean is okay". Of course, that's only true if FB is actively innovating, and, well, that's questionable (Yann Lecun has made some concerning statements about Facebook's role, or lack thereof, in radicalization).
      - takeda 6y ago
        Facebook and Twitter also have their own data centers, so it's not like AWS had to chose between Facebook, Parler or Twitter.
- ojnabieoot 6y ago
  Wait till you hear what us leftists want to do with Facebook! I will say that my preferred solution to the problem of Facebook (nationalization and open criminal investigations into its leadership) actually raises serious constitutional issues. The Parler case really really doesn’t - it doesn’t even raise good philosophical issues about free speech, just a bunch of dumb arguments.
  - repeatafterme1 6y ago
    I would like to hear.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- duskwuff 6y ago
  You're conflating two different issues. Some of the specific, concrete planning of violence may have taken place on Facebook. That doesn't appear to have been taking place as much on Parler -- possibly because it was less private -- but there was plenty of generally violent rhetoric on Parler, just less specific. "We should kill this person" (Parler) versus "Let's all meet up with our guns here" (Facebook).
- cma 6y ago
  But what percentage of Facebook activity was used for it within getting moderated vs what percentage of parler activity?
throwawayboise 6y ago
These things always start with moves that sound completely reasonable. Only time will tell if they expand their moderation demands.
- klmadfejno 6y ago
  Sure. And yet, completely reasonable things overwhelmingly tend not to lead to extreme outcomes. Only time will tell, but the point is that this is hardly an urgent warning sign.
  - svachalek 6y ago
    Indeed, this line of thinking is known as the Slippery Slope Fallacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope
- multjoy 6y ago
  What are these things, specifically?
  - Y-bar 6y ago
    > First they came for the nazis and qanon extremists threatening democracy, and I said nothing because fuck those people, they are the reason this verse exists.
    - klmadfejno 6y ago
      I would note, the original line is something along the lines of "i did nothing because I wasn't one of them". The line genuinely doesn't hold up as especially powerful when its "I did nothing because they self identify as a hate group against people like me"
- aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA 6y ago
  So, stop doing completely reasonable things then?
zamalek 6y ago
> They booted Parler off for violence issues. It baffles me how often violence issues become conflated with speech issues. You are absolutely correct, this is a violence issue. America has likely the most free speech protections in the world, but fighting words (violence) are not protected. There is a huge amount of precdent to support Amazon's actions here, dating back decades. Furthermore, just because Facebook did nothing is no reason for Amazon to sit idly by doing nothing. Is the advocation for Amazon to become another bystander? Is the superior situation to have all platforms supporting and enabling insurrection and possible sedition? Get off it. Amazon can make the right choice irrespective of their peers making the worst choice.
- fjabre 6y ago
  If that's true then pretty much every social media platform today should be banned from AWS.
- Blikkentrekker 6y ago
  Because violence to advance a cause the powers agree with is suddenly protected under free speech all the same. Many have pointed out that the storming of the capitol was not too dissimilar to many of the b.l.m. riots which were also often coördinated and featured chants of killing police officers. And it very much seems that whichever side one be on very much dictates how both are treated with both sides claiming that it is about violence irrespective of speech, but it's quite clear that the tolerance for violence is quite a bit lower when it concern an ideology one does not agree with.
  - klmadfejno 6y ago
    The sentiment you're trying to express here is empathy. There is more empathy for people protesting racial injustice and the murder of minority groups than there is for people waving hate group symbols and trying to kill political leaders. I don't see a need to demand a system void of empathy. It's not a one side issue. It's not right vs. left. In the case of parler, it's largly Nazi vs. not Nazi, and that's a particularly easy case to judge. Parler does not represent conservative America, even if the extremists at the rally claim otherwise. It represents a mix of violent hate groups and conspiracy theorists. The small proportion of BLM activists that were actively violent do not represent liberal America. Everyone has a choice. Everyone identifying as conservative can point at the white supremacists in DC and say "Those are my people" or "Those are not my people".

JeremyBanks 6y ago

If you choose to just call it "speech issues", it sounds worrying, but when you're a little more precise, "shutting them down for failing to remove calls for violence including many instances pointed out to them directly by Amazon's lawyers" sounds pretty reasonable.

OniBait 6y ago

I would suspect that it would give Twitter pause about hosting anything in AWS. But I doubt that is the case because there seems to have been a pretty clear-cut case of collusion between Twitter, Apple, Google and Amazon to silence Trump by any means possible.

ojnabieoot 6y ago

I am very sympathetic to the idea that ISPs should be common carriers, but definitely not colos and platforms like AWS. Let’s use an old-fashioned analogy. An ISP is like a post office, and people’s letters should not be meddled with (outside of violent threats or pursuant to a legal criminal investigation). In particular, ISPs are relevant to most individuals and ISPs (should) have respect for individual rights. But large platforms like AWS are more like large-scale mail printing and distribution, and is only really relevant to commercial enterprises. Such companies might choose to work with Sears to distribute catalogs, but decide not to work with Scientologists to distribute propaganda. They can be judicious in their choice of business partners without violating any individual rights - nobody has a right to any commercial partner they want. And in this case, AWS’s freedom of association rights (deciding not to do business with groups that aren’t federally protected, like the racist trolls who run Parler) are much more relevant here. AWS refusing to do business with Parler is not the same thing as Comcast refusing to allow access to things written by Parler’s users. It is more like Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing refusing to put racist screeds in an ebook.

echelon 6y ago
If we had a fully P2P and distributed architecture for information exchange, this wouldn't be a problem. As it stands, we choose centralized websites and platforms to be how we exchange information. They're an essential ingredient in the "common carrier" recipe. How can your parents share messages without Comcast + Facebook?
- vlunkr 6y ago
  We choose to use centralize platforms out of convenience, but if Facebook magically disappeared, people would immediately move to one of the many alternatives.
  - echelon 6y ago
    That's not a counter argument to what I've said. It's a platitude that I think everyone agrees on. You don't even need to conjure "magical disappearance". Social networks often come and go as fads. YikYak, Snapchat, TikTok. The thesis of what I said is that P2P mechanics are largely invariant of and shielded from business decisions, social mores, etc. We should consider building more P2P things.

bob33212 6y ago

There are two separate issues: 1. Is it good that a few people at a few large companies can decide what is and isn't acceptable speech in America. 2. Do media companies have the right to end business relationships with companies who they feel violate their contracts and Terms of Service. The obvious answer to #2 is yes. Otherwise you would be forcing Fox News to run adds calling all Fox News viewers racists, and forcing MSNBC to run adds with racial slurs in them. There isn't a clear answer to #1.Do these people have a conflict of interest? Who would do a better job? Biden? Trump?

richardARPANET 6y ago
3. Corporations and the government are MERGING in the USA. Biden just hired a tonne of ex-big tech staff to work on tech oversight policy, lol.
rodgerd 6y ago
> 1. Is it good that a few people at a few large companies can decide what is and isn't acceptable speech in America. Sure, but that's not like it's a new issue. And while I'm not suggesting you personally are raising it in bad faith, it's quite striking how much of the discourse - and I use that word in the broadest possible sense - on HN has appeared only after a pro-facist social media site lost its hosting, from folks who don't seem to have been concerned with, or even aggressively in favour of, companies banning "woke politics", or the constrol the Murdoch family exert over discourse in the English speaking world, and so on. Like sure, there's a legitimate social issue there, but most of the posting here just reinforces Satre.
- bob33212 6y ago
  I think you are conflating multiple groups. There is a group of people tired of woke culture invading their workspace. There is another group of people who are in a Pro-Trump bubble and believe that the election was stolen. There is another group of "libertarian / free speech" ideologues. There is another group who are surprised that a US President who had just received 74 million votes was "silenced" by big tech. My guess is that most of the concern you see on HN is from people in the last group that are afraid of what it means for society if a President can be cancelled. Personally, I think that their concern is overblown because Trump wasn't silenced he is just too lazy to take the time to come up with another messaging plan. I assume he is still on Twitter under a fake name hurling insults out at everyone.

xoa 6y ago

>It concerns me that AWS booted a site off their platform for speech issues I'm sorry for the caps but you and a host of others are forgetting something repeatedly and it's getting fairly annoying: AMAZON HAS FREE SPEECH RIGHTS TOO. Just as Parler does, and you do, and I do, and Twitter does, and the various owners and employees of these organizations do, and on and on. It's Free Speech all the way down. And a fundamental aspect of Free Speech isn't just the right to say something, it's necessarily the right to NOT say something, and to NOT provide material support against your will to speech you disagree with. If you or I or anyone else or any general organization decides to NOT provide help to someone else's speech, be it our own direct voice or access to our private property, that's not censorship that is itself Free Speech. They in turn have the right to complain, and to exercise their own freedom of association, and we may change our minds, or not, and others can chime in, and on and on forever. Free Speech is a system not an end goal, a constant churning that hopefully over long enough timescales will give us a better grasp of Truth. When government uses force, that halts the system, and speech becomes frozen. History and present indicates that the bar for that, though not infinite, should be quite high. Some companies that truly have natural monopolies or exercise quasi-governmental power may fall into that too, particularly if they in some way are significantly making use of government power themselves (limited spectrum allocation for cellular carriers for example, or physical infrastructure companies making use of public rights of way). But social and economic censure is a fundamental aspect of the process of Free Speech. 3rd parties aren't some disembodied Other, they're entities that have the same rights as anyone else by default.

umvi 6y ago
Should Verizon and T-Mobile have free speech rights too then? Why should they allow literal Nazis to communicate over their infrastructure?
- xoa 6y ago
  >Should Verizon and T-Mobile have free speech rights too then? Try reading the whole paragraph (emphasis added): >particularly if they in some way are significantly making use of government power themselves (limited spectrum allocation for cellular carriers for example Come on. >Why should they allow literal Nazis to communicate over their infrastructure? Because they're making use of a government granted monopoly on a physically limited common. They should in turn operate as common carriers.

ntsplnkv2 6y ago

There is no material reason why Parler can't host their own hardware, whereas it's unrealistic for someone to start their own ISP.

vlunkr 6y ago

I worked for a very small hosting company and we had to automatically detect and remove bitcoin miners because they were so common, I can't even imagine what AWS deals with. If AWS had to get a court order every time someone tried to do something illegal, or against TOS on their platform, the courts would be flooded immediately.

umvi 6y ago
> I worked for a very small hosting company and we had to automatically detect and remove bitcoin miners because they were so common, I can't even imagine what AWS deals with. Huh? Why shouldn't I be able to mine bitcoins on AWS? What's the point of paying to use people's computers if I can't use them for what I want? I pay AWS because I have money and they have servers and I want to pay them money in exchange for using their servers. So if I put a bitcoin miner on there running 24/7, I might rack up a huge bill, but why should Amazon care as long as I have the cash? I'm opposed to the idea that server usage should be morally vetted by the server owner. If something illegal is happening, by all means take it down, but "what you are doing is legal, but we disagree with it so bye bye" is a bad precedent, IMO.
- vlunkr 6y ago
  Maybe you can on AWS, I don't know, but it's also not the point. The purpose of our service was primarily for web hosting, and it ran on VMs, so one person consuming all the CPU time would negatively impact other customers. It's not that we morally objected, it's that it wasn't the business we wanted to provide, and it was against the TOS. Which is the same conclusion the judge came to in this Parler case.
  - umvi 6y ago
    > so one person consuming all the CPU time would negatively impact other customers So charge them more or limit their compute? If you are in the business of renting out compute resources then you need to spell out what the terms are. It's like renting out your car and then getting mad when someone drives it 2000 miles in one weekend. You need to spell out: "Yep, it's $50 a day, and you get 100 miles per day. Every mile after that is $1. If you want to drive the car further it's $100 per day" not "It's $50 per day unless we don't like what you are doing then we'll revoke the car arbitrarily" > It's not that we morally objected, it's that it wasn't the business we wanted to provide, and it was against the TOS Ok and what was the clause in the ToS they violated? I sure hope it was more specific than the vague arbitrary clause Amazon used to axe Parler.

fjabre 6y ago

I agree with this completely. You just send them further underground. There is no 'but' as people would have you believe here. But they are Nazis. But I don't agree with them. But they cause riots and violence. There's always a 'but'. Only a court order should have the power to shut these sites down and that's only if they present a clear and present danger. This is clearly a cultural cleansing of sorts. I remember other such cultural revolutions. China comes to mind.

tantalor 6y ago

> speech issues When your service is providing a platform for speech, what other issues can there be?

cush 6y ago

Have you seen The Social Dilemma? Shit's terrifying.