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Let's game plan for a moment. You are a hosting provider. One of your customers is violating your TOS and posting content that is objectionable. They are potent

by zaphar 6y ago

Let's game plan for a moment. You are a hosting provider. One of your customers is violating your TOS and posting content that is objectionable. They are potentially big and growing customer so you are giving them time to respond while you try to weight the cost and benefit of enforcement at this time. While you are working though this the customer is used as a platform to organize an attack on the government of the the country you are based in. 5 people died as a result and there is every indication that if the attack had gone the way the attackers wanted it to that more would be dead including the Vice President of the United States. Suddenly the cost calculation changes. It has become evident over the several months of negotiation that the customer has 0 intention of coming into compliance. The speech they are hosting has already resulted in a very large and very visible terrorist act. They have ceased to be profit center and become a liability. What do you do?

roenxi 6y ago
What you are presenting is the worldview of someone who is biased. I do suspect AWS was thinking that - which is why I'm not ruling out political bias. Even if that interpretation of the Capitol riot somehow, miraculously, turns out to be correct there hasn't been time to prove it with evidence. But, as chalst argues, there are interpretations where they were acting reasonably.
- TomSwirly 6y ago
  > What you are presenting is the worldview of someone who is biased. "This site we host was just used to plan a violent revolution. It's more trouble than it's worth, let's dump them." Is this what you mean by "bias"?
  - roenxi 6y ago
    No, the bias is assuming that is true and acting on it without sufficient evidence.
    - zaphar 6y ago
      What do you consider sufficient evidence here? There were multiple documented posts on Parler that have been documented running up to the events on Jan 6'th that show people organizing and preparing for it. The evidence was present before the decision by AWS. I know folks who were collecting that events weeks before the event and predicting violence based on what they were seeing. The evidence for it is only increasing now but there more than sufficient evidence on the day of the event to indicate that Parler was going to be a liability to anyone hosting them. Bias in this case works both ways. It makes some ignore the evidence that was already present. Businesses aren't courts that need to prove guilt. This was about getting rid of a high risk client who had made clear that they will not be changing their high risk behavior. There is no reason AWS needs to share in that risk after giving them the opportunity to change.
      - roenxi 6y ago
        > What do you consider sufficient evidence here? If I became convinced the expulsion had nothing to do with Jan 6 and was part of a standard process of review that AWS conducted for all their customers then that'd be sufficient. There were, generously, a few hundred people involved in the Capitol storming. It isn't obvious how organised they were organised since they lacked guns and riots sometimes start spontaneously from protests. AWS didn't have time to work out who they were, what they were trying to achieve, how they were organising, what there motivations were or what was going to happen next. Using that as a trigger to ban Parler - when they could easily have been organising on Facebook or in person - would be strong evidence of political bias. > Businesses aren't courts that need to prove guilt. I don't mind if AWS is biased, but part of the fun of kibitzing is assessing whether decisions are good or bad. AWS making decisions on bias rather than rational thought process would be bad. People who use evidence and can think in a consistent manner have a big advantage. Twitter made the mistake of trying to rationalise their bias, giving us a memorial of them trying to rationalise "To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th." as a call to violence. It is a legitimate concern that the same sort of evidence-free thinking could take root in AWS's leadership - they might easily be drawing their leadership from similar pools of people to Twitter since the big tech companies are acting in the same direction at the same time.
- astura 6y ago
  Yeah, you're going to find that most people are very much biased against enabling a violent coup on the government that is being really good to them. A coup that, if successful, has the potential to endanger their entire business, their wealth, and possibly their lives. BTW, "you're biased" is not, in and of itself, a reason to entirely shut down an argument as invalid.
  - roenxi 6y ago
    The bias isn't in the response, it is in the faulty interpretation: A coup that, if successful, has the potential to endanger their entire business, their wealth, and possibly their lives. Not only was this an unsupported at the time, but unless something really flashy happens it is only going to become more obviously wrong. 1 violent riot in 2021 compares not so badly to the widespread peaceful arson and looting in 2020 that was brushed off as routine political expression. > BTW, "you're biased" is not, in and of itself, a reason to entirely shut down an argument as invalid. No argument on that particular point, but it is a decent reason not to try and use a certain infrastructure provider for communication tools or artistic content. Most people are looking for a dumb pipe when they pick an infrastructure provider, not a back-seat moderator with a twitchy trigger finger.

by zaphar 6y ago

roenxi 6y ago

What you are presenting is the worldview of someone who is biased. I do suspect AWS was thinking that - which is why I'm not ruling out political bias. Even if that interpretation of the Capitol riot somehow, miraculously, turns out to be correct there hasn't been time to prove it with evidence. But, as chalst argues, there are interpretations where they were acting reasonably.

TomSwirly 6y ago
> What you are presenting is the worldview of someone who is biased. "This site we host was just used to plan a violent revolution. It's more trouble than it's worth, let's dump them." Is this what you mean by "bias"?
- roenxi 6y ago
  No, the bias is assuming that is true and acting on it without sufficient evidence.
  - zaphar 6y ago
    What do you consider sufficient evidence here? There were multiple documented posts on Parler that have been documented running up to the events on Jan 6'th that show people organizing and preparing for it. The evidence was present before the decision by AWS. I know folks who were collecting that events weeks before the event and predicting violence based on what they were seeing. The evidence for it is only increasing now but there more than sufficient evidence on the day of the event to indicate that Parler was going to be a liability to anyone hosting them. Bias in this case works both ways. It makes some ignore the evidence that was already present. Businesses aren't courts that need to prove guilt. This was about getting rid of a high risk client who had made clear that they will not be changing their high risk behavior. There is no reason AWS needs to share in that risk after giving them the opportunity to change.
    - roenxi 6y ago
      > What do you consider sufficient evidence here? If I became convinced the expulsion had nothing to do with Jan 6 and was part of a standard process of review that AWS conducted for all their customers then that'd be sufficient. There were, generously, a few hundred people involved in the Capitol storming. It isn't obvious how organised they were organised since they lacked guns and riots sometimes start spontaneously from protests. AWS didn't have time to work out who they were, what they were trying to achieve, how they were organising, what there motivations were or what was going to happen next. Using that as a trigger to ban Parler - when they could easily have been organising on Facebook or in person - would be strong evidence of political bias. > Businesses aren't courts that need to prove guilt. I don't mind if AWS is biased, but part of the fun of kibitzing is assessing whether decisions are good or bad. AWS making decisions on bias rather than rational thought process would be bad. People who use evidence and can think in a consistent manner have a big advantage. Twitter made the mistake of trying to rationalise their bias, giving us a memorial of them trying to rationalise "To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th." as a call to violence. It is a legitimate concern that the same sort of evidence-free thinking could take root in AWS's leadership - they might easily be drawing their leadership from similar pools of people to Twitter since the big tech companies are acting in the same direction at the same time.
astura 6y ago
Yeah, you're going to find that most people are very much biased against enabling a violent coup on the government that is being really good to them. A coup that, if successful, has the potential to endanger their entire business, their wealth, and possibly their lives. BTW, "you're biased" is not, in and of itself, a reason to entirely shut down an argument as invalid.
- roenxi 6y ago
  The bias isn't in the response, it is in the faulty interpretation: A coup that, if successful, has the potential to endanger their entire business, their wealth, and possibly their lives. Not only was this an unsupported at the time, but unless something really flashy happens it is only going to become more obviously wrong. 1 violent riot in 2021 compares not so badly to the widespread peaceful arson and looting in 2020 that was brushed off as routine political expression. > BTW, "you're biased" is not, in and of itself, a reason to entirely shut down an argument as invalid. No argument on that particular point, but it is a decent reason not to try and use a certain infrastructure provider for communication tools or artistic content. Most people are looking for a dumb pipe when they pick an infrastructure provider, not a back-seat moderator with a twitchy trigger finger.