20 ms·

As much as I don't like Parler's digital death sentence from Silicon Valley, they should've known this was coming and prepared. It doesn't take a genius to know

• freedomben 6y ago
  If you listen to the Megyn Kelly interview with Parler's CEO, they did expect this and had a second entirely different hosting provider lined up. They would have made the move by the deadline too, except the second hosting provider also dropped them due to extreme pressure.
  • throwaway45349 6y ago
    I do believe that should've also been in their threat model - these guys should've acted like they were hosting The Pirate Bay 2 given the state of American politics. For instance, they could've had a low-traffic backup in read-only mode, or prevent new sign-ups. Or have an application layer switch to reduce outgoing bandwidth (HTML only) to squeeze into a coloc facility on short notice.
    • Threeve303 6y ago
      Engineering the site well to stay online might be beside the point now. Parler wanted to be taken down so that they could fight this legal battle, likely with an eye on Section 230. As an added bonus, they can frame the removal as persecution.
      • bilbo0s 6y ago
        Clearly it's a battle they're likely to lose, but I wish them luck. The only way forward in my view is to actually change laws. Anything short of that, is a fool's errand. All this is already settled law and has been litigated previously multiple times. You have to change the law in order to reclassify these entities if you want things to change. What orgs like Parler keep doing right now is spitting into the wind.
        • r00fus 6y ago
          They thought they were gonna be old Kanobi vs. Vader - vanquished but become more powerful. It would have made sense if their belief system (ie, Trump and alt-right moving mountains to make them viable) were in place. Clearly that wasn't the case and they will be a footnote in history.
      • freedomben 6y ago
        I'm not doubting you, but do you have a source for: > Parler wanted to be taken down so that they could fight this legal battle ?
    • snoshy 6y ago
      I'm not sure if I agree with that. Outside of unabashed copyright infringement and grossly objectionable content (child porn, etc.), there hasn't been a real precedent for a tech player getting booted like this on a moment's notice. If a scenario has never occurred before, I don't see why you'd add it to your threat model. That being said, they did not have the engineering expertise to even make a resilient stack on top of AWS. If you're running a free trial version of Okta to secure your assets in production [1], all of what you're proposing is a distant dream. [1] https://twitter.com/okta/status/1348191370528256002 https://twitter.com/okta/status/1348191370528256002
      • 8note 6y ago
        OFAC compliance seems like an obvious comparison? If your company gets put on an terrorist list, you'll be removed from US services very quickly.
      • cygx 6y ago
        there hasn't been a real precedent for a tech player getting booted like this on a moment's notice Gab after the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting?
    • analyte123 6y ago
      Somebody leaked an email where they were soliciting new hosting, and they needed 100+ giant instances. They were clearly sloppy and inefficient from the very beginning.
    • gowld 6y ago
      The Pirate Bay team explicitly mocked them for this.
• samrmay 6y ago
  I've heard other people say similar claims (about Twitter hosting equal/greater amounts of hate speech, threats, etc.). Totally plausible and I wouldn't be surprised if it were definitively true, but have there been any data driven studies to back it up? Don't know if sentiment analysis ML algorithms are powerful enough to do something like this, but there has to be some scientific consensus on the relative hateful content that each site allows right? Or at least some pretty graphs.
• albinofrenchy 6y ago
  Does twitter get away with hosting way worse content? Parler explicitly does not moderate calls both subtle and overt to violence -- much less just blatant propaganda. Pretty sure the reason parler gained traction is that twitter does.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • throwaway45349 6y ago
    If you saw the amount of left-wing content calling for the execution of politicians, calling for communist revolutions, you wouldn't be asking this question. Twitter is just as toxic as Parler, except one is left-wing and the other is right-wing. If it was the left being censored I would be outraged on their behalf as well. Edit: Not if, when the left gets censored by big tech, I will stand for freedom of speech with them, but I don't think many conservatives will be left to stand with us.
    • richardARPANET 6y ago
      Exactly. And now the leftists down vote you for presenting facts.
      • dang 6y ago
        You've been posting so many flamewar comments to HN that we've banned the account. It's too bad, because if you would use the site as intended, HN would be better for having you. But you've been flouting the rules egregiously and often, to the point where it's become the only thing that you're doing here. That's not cool. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    • 8note 6y ago
      Twitter is left wing? I thought it was mastodon that was left wing version
• nostromo 6y ago
  It's worth noting how much soft power the political left in America has, despite being about 50% of voters. Hollywood, Silicon Valley, academia, and the news media all lean left. This means you should expect to have an uphill battle if you want to do anything in these areas that might counter their preferences. I think all this soft power actually hurts the left in America, because our country's default state is a bit of an echo-chamber. It's possible to go to university, watch movies, read the news everyday, and have no idea what the other half of the country is thinking or saying.
  • triceratops 6y ago
    It's worth noting how much actual political power the right in America has, despite being about 50% of voters. The Senate and electoral college favor them massively. This means you should expect to have an uphill battle if you want to change any laws that might counter their preferences.
    • whatshisface 6y ago
      A business that is heavily involved with local government has to sweat Republican politics, a business that is heavily involved with technology, the media, or other forms of nonstate power has to sweat Democrat politics. I guess it would be nice if companies could simply focus on getting their job done and not have to sweat anyone's politics at all.
      • hellotomyrars 6y ago
        It would be nice if it were possible to be apolitical but in many respects it isn't depending on the nature of your business and that's a reality I think some people are reticent to accept. Corporations exist to make money and there isn't an industry out there that doesn't actively lobby in their interest. Turns out being `apolitical` is kind of a myth.
      • xxpor 6y ago
        Politics is the the practice of how to organize society. There's no such thing as an apolitical entity. At the most basic level, just the fact that corporations exist is itself a political decision.
• tptacek 6y ago
  The premise of Parler directly contravenes the AWS AUP, which demands that companies ensure their users comply with AWS's AUP and that companies kick users that don't. The whole point of Parler is to host Twitter users who violate Twitter's TOS, which is a cohort significantly comprised of people who are also violating AWS's TOS. To believe that Parler would have been viable on AWS to begin with, they had to actively avoid reading the AWS terms of service. And, I mean, I'm sure they didn't, just like they apparently didn't authorize anonymous HTTP requests for their users assets. The whole effort seems clownish and performative. In that light, I think I object to the notion of a "digital death sentence". They chose an incompatible provider for the services that they needed, and suffered the consequences. Gab, a service that is objectively far worse than Parler, appears to be doing just fine; in fact, they went through something similar to this after the Tree of Life shooting was planned on their service, and Parler had to have not paid any attention whatsoever to what happened to their most important competitor to have believed they had a chance on AWS.
  • throwaway45349 6y ago
    I get it, companies do not legally have to provide these services to right-wing groups persecuted off of Twitter. I'm saying that it's _morally_ wrong to deplatform. Not necessarily because I enjoy having this speech hosted, but because isolating and pushing out so called "deplorables" is escalating the current American political conflicts to serious violence. As I said in my other comment, when the disenfranchised can't speak, they get violent. If you disagree with these people, say that to them. Cutting them off from the mainstream public squares like Twitter and Facebook just creates a new generation of radicals. Silicon Valley used to stand for freedom of speech for a reason.
    • clusterfish 6y ago
      > If you disagree with these people, say that to them That doesn't seem to be working in a post-truth world. Not sure what the solution is, but this isn't nearly enough.
      • throwaway45349 6y ago
• PragmaticPulp 6y ago
  > It doesn't take a genius to know that such a controversial website is going to get dropped, even if it's just because it makes the webhost look bad. Parler wasn't dropped for making Amazon look bad. Parler was dropped for repeatedly failing to address blatant terms of service violations. AWS still hosts the National Enquirer, the magazine that literally tried to blackmail Jeff Bezos. AWS is hardly in the habit of removing sites that make them look bad. Parler has gained a reputation for being some sort of free-speech platform, but it was anything but. They had heavy-handed moderation that routinely banned people and removed content for not agreeing with the popular sentiment. They made a deliberate choice to continue to leave explicit calls to violence on their website, and they were removed from AWS for it. Twitter doesn't have perfect execution of their moderation across all of their tweets, obviously, but they are at least making a good faith effort to remove content that has explicit calls to violence.
  • richardARPANET 6y ago
    Dropped by Amazon, in coordination with both App Stores just as it reached #1 ranked app. Really really interesting.
    • GavinMcG 6y ago
      Not everything is a grand conspiracy. Sometimes society really isn't okay with what you're doing.
      • richardARPANET 6y ago
        Exactly, it's not a conspiracy if they're telling you they're doing it: https://twitter.com/Policy/status/1349059276975857664 https://twitter.com/Policy/status/1349059276975857664 It's a big club, and you ain't in it.
      • Spivak 6y ago
        Also I think dogpiling is often confused, intentionally or not, as conspiracy. It seems like a lot of people really really wanted to drop them but weren't brave enough to make the first move.
• ogre_codes 6y ago
  > Yes it's unfair that Twitter gets away with hosting way worse content Nonsense. Parler was created to host content which Twitter blocked and users which Twitter banned. Not suggesting Twitter was in the clear here, but suggesting Twitter was worse is BS. Parler tolerated much worse content, and on average content on Parler was much more incendiary.
• toofy 6y ago
  > Yes it's unfair that Twitter gets away with hosting way worse content, but life is unfair, that doesn't mean you stick your head in the sand and pretend the risk of de-platforming never existed. Im with everything your post says, but I’m not even fully convinced this is an issue. Twitter can argue a good faith effort and point to millions of accounts and posts it has removed–from all political persuasions. It can also point to constant policy changes to address what Amazons policy sees as a very real problem. parler on the other hand has had its ceo say quite clearly that they have zero intention as a company to even address this problem.
• curun1r 6y ago
  > Twitter gets away with hosting way worse content Twitter also hosts lots of content that's way better. Among the highly relevant, when it comes to AWS decision making, AWS evangelists like Jeff Barr and Andy Jassy use Twitter to communicate with customers. AWS itself has a Twitter account for status updates. There's just a ton of stuff on Twitter that is absolutely fine and would be collateral damage were Twitter shut down. In the realm of taking down providers for copyright violations, the courts recognize a standard of "substantial non-infringing use" as a way to minimize that collateral damage. A provider like YouTube, which had a ton of both legal and illegal content prior to the Google acquisition, was allowed to stay up whereas a provider like Napster was shut down because they found it to be almost entirely copyright violation. It seems like directly equating Twitter and Parler is a false equivalence. Twitter is a generic platform that some users use for problematic political discussion. Parler is a platform specifically targeted at problematic political discussion. You can't target the problematic stuff and expect the same protection as someone who casts a wider net.
• threatofrain 6y ago
  According to the CEO of Parler, banks and payment vendors, law firms, text and mail services also cancelled on them. This is why Parler also motivates discussion of alternative currency.
• cush 6y ago
  It's more of a philosophical conversation, but any social media app is really just an extension of its users. If you only have horrible users posting horrible content, then you have a horrible app. It's easy for us, knowing the tech, to argue the opposite, but in practice, there's no separating the two.
• thepace 6y ago
  Cloud platforms like AWS, Azure and GCP, are now the de-facto operating systems for web apps and services. Section 230 also provides them immunity from the content that gets hosted in those platforms. I find it unfortunate that we are in this situation where the platform providers are also playing the police. They should stick to being a platform and policing side of this should be left to the law enforcement. What will we feel if Microsoft and Apple start deciding what kind of contents can be generated and saved in their operating systems? It feels like time is ripe for a cloud provider that simply provides a platform.
  • 0x445442 6y ago
    Or Verizon starts deciding what voice conversations are allowed on "their" network.
• ben509 6y ago
  The real problem is that Parler sincerely wanted to start a free speech platform, and this is another data point that the idea, while well intentioned, doesn't work. It's a just-world fallacy: because free speech is a good and just thing, a business model predicated on free speech will be successful. The first trouble is that you are opening the doors to all sorts of extremists. Whether they're far left, far right or simply personally unhinged, they are as predatory as spammers. They have no qualms about abusing your good will and s**ing in the punch bowl. Same thing happened with Gab and Minds, but also smaller bulletin boards I've seen over the years. You set up a free speech site, and next thing you have a bunch of Nazis festooning it with swastikas. They're just like spammers, except they're spamming ideology instead of work from home scams. The second trouble is that Parler is a competitor to established media corporations, who have a strong incentive to shut them down. That's a reality that every new business needs to face: established firms do not want competition. All the people running amok provide the established firms with plenty of ammo to tar the upstart's reputation. And while they are biased by their incentives, they feel they are acting justly because they see all the extremist lunatics there. AWS didn't fabricate those incidents on Parler, all those were real posts.
  • amanaplanacanal 6y ago
    Did they actually want a free speech platform? I thought they were known for booting lefties off the platform.
    • ben509 6y ago
      All the partisan boards I've seen, left and right, all plainly labeled themselves as such. If you're going to be a place for like-minded people, that's a selling point. It doesn't make a lot of business sense to say, "we invite everyone in" and then plan on kicking out a lot of users. There are loads of simpler reasons why lefties thought they were getting booted, especially incompetence on Parler's part.
  • mr_toad 6y ago
    When the likes of Facebook start to worry about competition or they just buy them. Look at WhatsApp. AWS didn’t see Parler as competition, just a liability.