13 ms·

Amazon to remove more content that violates rules from cloud service – sources

127 points by samizdis 5y ago

goatcode 5y ago
Easy solution any side can get on board with, for potentially different reasons: If a corporation receives tax or direct financial benefits from the US federal government, it must be bound by the same laws as the US federal government. Even the ones the US federal government ignores.
- qweqwweqwe-90i 5y ago
  Ok, then what do you do once all these companies stop doing business with the US government? The US government will find someone else to buy these services from - maybe they will have to pay more... no big deal. How is this a "solution"?
  - Mountain_Skies 5y ago
    Governments pay more all the time for various social and political purposes. For Amazon and other tech companies "The government made us do it" is probably what they're after anyway. It allows them to service everyone and not have to face boycotts from anyone.
    - qweqwweqwe-90i 5y ago
      I think what the OP wants is amazon to not discriminate based on anything which would definitively lead to people boycotting them.
  - goatcode 5y ago
    Drat, I didn't come up with a perfect plan, with no possible hypothetical what-if responses. Back to the drawing board. It's a solution to keep corporations that grow big enough to cause societal issues, having grown that big through utilizing society's resources, somewhat more accountable. There might be issues, but I'd suspect there to be more issues with the current solution: being "nothing."
- nonameiguess 5y ago
  The article is saying Amazon made news by shutting down an ISIS propaganda site celebrating a suicide bombing that killed 183 people last week. It's fairly likely the US federal government is at least exploring plans to find and kill whoever owned that site, so I don't see how holding Amazon to the same level of restriction as the US federal government makes a difference here. Freedom of speech doesn't give you freedom to use the Internet to plot a criminal conspiracy to kill US soldiers.
  - refenestrator 5y ago
    Note that it's totally uncontroversial, bordering on mandatory, to support our return strike which killed dozens of people. Also firmly in bounds to insist we stay there and do it on a nightly basis, forever. Majority opinion of people with microphones. But the other guys? On the other side of the fight? Completely unconscionable to host any of their speech. We don't encourage violence.
  - goatcode 5y ago
    I don't think the federal government is required by law to kill people.
josh_today 5y ago
Corporations’ digital rights are protected more than the individual. We need a digital bill of rights.
- samizdis 5y ago
  I've seen that call quite frequently in the past couple of years. Such as in a Guardian article [1], and from groups such as Neeva [2] - worth checking its "about" section [3] to see its backers etc. Also, I think, worth taking the sort of sceptical stance expressed in a Wired article [4] from 2019, What’s a Digital Bill of Rights Without Enforcement?, which points out that some players ostensibly backing digital rights are possibly wolves in sheep's clothing. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jan/28/americans-need-a-digital-bill-of-rights-heres-why https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jan/28/americ... [2] https://neeva.com/digital-bill-of-rights https://neeva.com/digital-bill-of-rights [3] https://neeva.com/about https://neeva.com/about [4] https://www.wired.com/story/whats-digital-bill-rights-without-enforcement/ https://www.wired.com/story/whats-digital-bill-rights-withou...
- chrononaut 5y ago
  > We need a digital bill of rights. What would be in such a digital bill of rights? (This is a bit vague for me to understand what you're necessarily advocating for)
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - jollybean 5y ago
    Things like right to privacy, the right to not be arbitrarily excluded from services esp. for things like political views, the 'right to be forgotten', transparency in terms of information sharing, clarity in billing, the right to delete accounts permanently, etc. etc.. I think such a thing is actually more important than the monopolizing issues of the FAANGS. Breaking them up might be a little nice, but as individuals we're beholden to the incredible gatekeeping of industry.
  - 5y ago
Causality1 5y ago
Hosting the websites of terrorist groups is something few people would advocate, but the misinformation thing is beginning to really ride the line. Am I going to have to start worrying about whether my online backups have pirated music? If I see a piece of CSAM on Facebook and report it, should I worry about the copy of it in my browser cache being uploaded into my system backup?
- Spooky23 5y ago
  Yes. It’s the digital equivalent of having cocaine stuffed in your cars’ back seat. Doesn’t matter how it got there.
  - FpUser 5y ago
    Actually it does. If you did not put it there but were instead set up good lawyer might be able to get you off the hook assuming you can afford good lawyer. The so called "equal" justice truly sucks. I once saw government trying to deny legal aid to person X on a basis that the offence is minor and the risk to be imprisoned is low, never mind the fact that having criminal record can completely screw person's life later on.
    - Spooky23 5y ago
      It all depends on the prosecutor. I served on a jury where a driver was being prosecuted for possession with intent to distribute for reasons nobody understood. The passenger, who wasn’t known to the driver, in the back seat confessed at the scene and plead guilty months earlier. It was obvious that something hinky was up. In this case, the jurors were all disgusted and found the guy not guilty. One of the jurors was a retired US Attorney who was upset enough that he submitted a complaint to the bar association. Justice was served, but going through a trial is a life altering experience.
      - FpUser 5y ago
        I wish the prosecutor was criminally charged with malicious prosecution and big compensation awarded to the driver so that the next time some scumbag trying to use justice system like this will think twice.
ajsnigrutin 5y ago
Here we go again... platform vs publisher... If you choose to decide what stays on your platform and what is removed, you should be responsible for the stuff that stays there. If you want to offload the liability to users/posters/commenters/..., then you should not be able to have agendas and decide what is removed (except for illegal stuff of course).
- ceejayoz 5y ago
  Stop trying to make this a thing. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/12/publisher-or-platform-it-doesnt-matter https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/12/publisher-or-platform-... > We’ll say it plainly here: there is no legal significance to labeling an online service a “platform” as opposed to a “publisher.” Yes. That’s right. There is no legal significance to labeling an online service a “platform.” Nor does the law treat online services differently based on their ideological “neutrality” or lack thereof.
  - jollybean 5y ago
    That there is no legal distinction and Amazon may be within it's rights, doesn't make it right. Imagine if Amazon actually does start using political criteria for hosting services, and bans journalists speaking out against torture? Or suppresses sites hosting videos of police brutality? How high on the horse would the EFF be in this position? The EFF is correct to point out the legal situation in that there's no difference between a publisher and a platform etc. but this is going to get out of hand quickly as corporations start abusing their ability to filter data willy nilly. I think it also runs counter to the spirit of Net Neutrality and frankly hypocritical in this context. I don't trust for a moment that Verizon and A&T won't get into the business of messing with information as well to the extent that they have the power to do this. Our roads and infrastructure generally remain free of interference unless there's something very illegal going on, we ought to maintain some of these practices on the internet itself.
    - ceejayoz 5y ago
      You don't want it to become a thing, either. Section 230 protections enhance free speech on the internet, via the safe harbor provisions that allow places like Twitter and HN to function. Without it, you'd have vastly fewer places to publish your thoughts. Codifying a distinction between platform and publisher would require a place like HN to consider either shutting down comments and submissions entirely or abandoning any efforts at moderation. It would suck, royally.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y ago
> Amazon.com Inc (AMZN.O) plans to take a more proactive approach to determine what types of content violate its cloud service policies, such as rules against promoting violence, and enforce its removal, according to two sources, I am old enough to remember in the 1990's that a lot of people believed that video games promoted violence. I believe that once a technology becomes widespread enough to become infrastructure it needs to be regulated to allow fair access to it. See examples of railroads, phone lines, etc.
- chrononaut 5y ago
  Except in the case of hosting providers (and other services) you have options. A lot of options usually. At what point in the infrastructure stack would you draw the line? Something like AWS is far removed from the ultimate regulation that may it difficult to start such a competitor (running your own fiber?) Would SMS providers like twilio be considered the same, built on top of a regulated industry?
- johnnyanmac 5y ago
  TBF, everyone has fair access to whipping up any of hundreds of domain servers (including their own homespun server) and buying a domain name to direct to. No one company has a monopoly or oligopoly for creating a public website This isn't quite like citizens lobbying the government to restrict media. This is a private storage company adjusting their policies on what they allow to be stored on their servers.
  - lostmsu 5y ago
    This is a "First they came for socialists" argument, but applied at independent levels of tech stack. - VM hosting - DNS hosting - ISP Where do we draw the line? I'd rather none of the above to be able to refuse service based on thought policing.
    - 8note 5y ago
      Banking? The Taliban should probably have access to both their websites and Afghanistan's wealth, regardless of whether their ideas are illegal in the states
pessimizer 5y ago
The internet has a new editor. Be prepared for your blog to be crawled by an AI for paragraphs that warrant further inspection by a minimum wage employee, and unappealable bans. I remember from a few years ago a well-regarded BASE jumper's passionate post on Facebook about wingsuits killing people, after the wingsuit-related death of another well-regarded BASE jumper he knew. IIRC he used the earnest rhetorical device of saying that he was glad his friend died so publicly, because it would stop young people getting into the sport from using wingsuits, because they were unreasonably dangerous. There was a lot of debate back and forth about wingsuits stimulated by the post (which was its purpose), but I was shocked for a different reason. Facebook deleted it, for saying that he was glad someone died. So now, the entire internet governed by the owner of the Washington Post. The idea that the west is intrinsically superior to China in terms of freedom and censorship is a joke. Our army of censors is as big as theirs, and we share technologies and methods.
- jchw 5y ago
  I was with you up until the end. Sorry, but that’s just ignorant.
- chrononaut 5y ago
  I don't quite understand the leaps of logic here, from an action that Facebook did, to how freedom and censorship in China is equivalent to those in the west. The best I can gather is that you're implying that _in practice_ the same level of censorship exists considering all actors involved? If that's the correct interpretation there is still a notable difference between what the government can coerce you to do, and what Facebook can coerce you. Isn't this why constitutional tenants (of freedom of speech) are important?
- kragen 5y ago
  To be fair, although the US has a larger percentage of its population imprisoned than China, its government is much less intrusive and permits a great deal more political dissent, for now.
ausbah 5y ago
this just seems like enhanced liability protection
YetAnotherNick 5y ago
But why? Why give away any money which you could take? Is it due to Amazon believing in morals(which is seemingly absent in the way they treat their own employees)? Is it because there are business who would caution away if there are specific content hosted there(which seems very unlikely as unlike social network all content are basically separated)? Or is it due to government pressure or regulation?
- guerrilla 5y ago
  > Is it due to Amazon believing in morals(which is seemingly absent in the way they treat their own employees)? What, no, that's insane. The theory I hear on here often is that they're trying to avoid regulation. I don't know if that's true but whatever they're doing, it's to avoid exposure potential costs. They've calculated that the lost business is worth less than the cost of whatever risks they forsee. Either that or they have some extremely powerful ideologues in control.
- tablespoon 5y ago
  > But why? Why give away any money which you could take? Is it due to Amazon believing in morals(which is seemingly absent in the way they treat their own employees)? F-ck no. It's because they don't want to end up in the news, getting called out for hosting that stuff. From the OP: > Activists and human rights groups are increasingly holding not just websites and apps accountable for harmful content, but also the underlying tech infrastructure that enables those sites to operate, while political conservatives decry the curtailing of free speech. Last week there was a Washington Post article about how they were hosting an ISIS website that celebrated the recent Kabul suicide bombing, and earlier this year they were getting flak for hosting Parler. They probably want to prevent that from happening again, or at least have something better to say when they get in the news for it.
- revicon 5y ago
  This is addressed in the article. It’s about avoiding public relation issues when they’re found hosting stuff that someone will find offensive… “ Better preparation against certain types of content could help Amazon avoid legal and public relations risk. "If (Amazon) can get some of this stuff off proactively before it's discovered and becomes a big news story, there's value in avoiding that reputational damage,"
rubyist5eva 5y ago
All hail Thought-Lord Bezos
tomohawk 5y ago
Yeah, because I trust amazon to know truth from fiction. I suppose it's a great move if you hate science. They'll base their decisions on what some 'authority' has to say about it, and the whole point of science is the belief that some authority may not actually know the truth.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
eplanit 5y ago
"Activists and human rights groups are increasingly holding not just websites and apps accountable for harmful content, but also the underlying tech infrastructure that enables those sites to operate, while political conservatives decry the curtailing of free speech." A very interesting quote, in that (a) it casts all those wanting censorship as "human rights groups" -- is that what Twitter mobs are called now?; also, (b) it's interesting how it's now the "political conservatives" decrying the curtailing of free speech, while the Left are ever expanding what is "harmful content" (a Newspeak phrase if there ever was one) and demanding it be censored.
kntmckenebrt 5y ago
Good. Now we need to get the banks to close the accounts of the creators, the computer makers to stop selling hardware to them or brick it remotely and the utilities to disconnect them. This would be much simpler if we had a list to put people on so that we could automate the steps.
- dang 5y ago
  Please stop posting flamebait to Hacker News. Also, could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix&page=0&query=community%20identity%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
cblconfederate 5y ago
Funny how amazon or google were never investigated for years about the tons of pirated content they host, yet tiny hosting sites are being shut down before they even start.
- lelanthran 5y ago
  > Funny how amazon or google were never investigated for years about the tons of pirated content they host, yet tiny hosting sites are being shut down before they even start. It's called "pulling up the ladder behind you". The US did it with patents - for tens of decades the US just ignored patent law (read up on why Hollywood was founded). Once they had enough patents, they started rigorously enforcing it around the world so other countries would have to pay a tax for using knowledge. Most large corporations today are where they are because they were not tightly regulated when small, once they got big they pushed for regulations that were onerous for small companies, hence introducing an artificial barrier that prevents competitors to them from starting off the same way they did. The "#MeToo" movement looked like much of the same as well - a lot of young men and women in Hollywood got their start from the casting couch. By taking away that option (not that they succeeded, as far as I know) they ensure that there are fewer younger and more attractive competitors. "Pull up the ladder behind you" is an old and viable strategy that applies almost anywhere there is competition, and the intention is to reduce competition by making sure that future competition cannot use the same easy channels to success that the ladder-puller did.
malwrar 5y ago
AWS isn't unique anymore and charges far more than other hosting providers (especially if you consider bandwidth). Modern software deployment solutions are quickly negating the cost-savings and convenience of autoscaling too. This just leaves AWS with a variety of unique, overpriced, yet convenient services and their popularity as their only noteworthy selling points. My bet is that they'll end up banning the wrong customer(s) and gain a reputation for being an unreliable partner compared to other hosts, excited to watch that happen. There's also a huge risk in my mind that catering to Twitter mobs and politicians making regulatory threats will become normal as a result of this, but who knows what the zeitgeist will be in 5 years. I'll be remembering this forever though.
- kragen 5y ago
  More likely, non-AWS cloud providers will either fall in line or get tarred as being the Gab/Parler of hosting services, stigmatizing whoever uses them. This will lead to people moving to AWS or another cloud provider that "removes more content" in order to avoid having their site blocked from Facebook sharing, Google search, Gmail, Twitter, etc.
  - throwawaysea 5y ago
    I think this generalizes further too. Any incumbent group that holds power (or its supporters) will assail newcomers as being [something bad]. For instance, those on the political left, which is supported in kind by big tech, might attack some new social media platform as a haven for white supremacists. The charge doesn’t have to be true - it just has to stick in order to scare everyone who fears that label away, and the damage is done. Users, advertisers, web hosts, app stores, and so on will all abandon the platform. It’s an effective way to keep power on the side of the incumbents.
    - kragen 5y ago
      Right, of course. That's how most of civilization worked for 3000 years until we invented liberalism in the 01700s: if you pled for mercy for the heretics or argued that we should hear them out, you were a heretic too. It's a major reason progress was so slow. One of the charges against Socrates at his trial was that he claimed that the Sun was not actually divine, but merely natural matter such as a stone, a charge he denied. Hopefully we can find a way to preserve some sort of enclave of liberalism despite the US abandoning it.
neonate 5y ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20210903022509/https://www.reuters.com/technology/exclusive-amazon-proactively-remove-more-content-that-violates-rules-cloud-2021-09-02/ https://web.archive.org/web/20210903022509/https://www.reute... https://archive.is/G2h30 https://archive.is/G2h30
collsni 5y ago
It is interesting to see the general community turn against cloud. I mean they own the platform, what did you expect? This is the same argument of businesses requiring masks. I've been working to get everything of mine out of the cloud for a few years now and am pretty happy about most of the open source products I host.
iammisc 5y ago
Glad I dumped cloud and self host. $200/month plus fixed capital costs for a bit of rack space and equipment. With kubernetes, nix, and open source aws replacements, I'm paying less and have way more room for scalability. In my own experience, I am glad more and more social media are silencing conservative voices. We get to move to newer platforms where we don't need to put up with the brigading. Eventually the old ones will go the way of myspace. I see Amazon web services going the same way.
- kragen 5y ago
  It's only a matter of time until your rack space provider feels pressure to enforce similar rules. Instead of looking to Kubernetes, Nix, and OpenStack, you should be looking to Tor, Bitcoin, and BitTorrent. Silencing voices is generally a big part of what conservatism is all about: in order to securely establish inherited privileges, it must silence whoever credibly criticizes them.
  - djrogers 5y ago
    > Silencing voices is generally a big part of what conservatism is all about The same can be said for the modern Marxist movement, progressivism, and the social justice movement. Trying to paint the loss of liberty and liberalism as the fault of only one of the two big political parties is folly.
    - kragen 5y ago
      I agree, but the parent was talking about conservatism, not Marxism or progressivism, and I didn't want to degrade the conversation with whataboutism. I've elaborated on that theme at greater length in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28401596 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28401596.
  - cblconfederate 5y ago
    there 's a lot more competition on the rack space though, they are not limited to a cartel of 3
  - 5y ago
kodah 5y ago
> Amazon made headlines in the Washington Post last week for shutting down a website hosted on AWS that featured propaganda from Islamic State that celebrated the suicide bombing that killed an estimated 170 Afghans and 13 U.S. troops in Kabul last Thursday. They did so after the news organization contacted Amazon, according to the Post. I'll preface this with the fact that I served in the war on terror. I don't think AWS should. The government is the arbiter of what is legal and not legal. This whole concept that people have built on over decades that "free speech means you won't be oppressed by the government but not that you won't face 'consequences'" is an absolute farce. If our "values" were ever equally enforced then the day Trump was thrown off of Twitter for his amping of radical right wingers that caused an insurrection then Malang Khostay would've been thrown off as well for being the actual spokesperson of the Taliban. It is the government's job to determine minimally viable standards and attempt to compel enforcement, as soon as you make "values" the arbiter people stop baking cakes for gay people and think it's okay.
- throwaway210222 5y ago
  > free speech means you won't be oppressed by the government but not that you won't face 'consequences'" is an absolute farce. By that definition there is free speech in North Korea.
  - kodah 5y ago
    A little different I'd argue. People are talking about private citizens and companies enforcing extra-legal standards on you.
  - zxcvbn4038 5y ago
    The loophole in the US has always been the private sector. Most mass media is controlled by a handful of individuals who play along nicely with what the government wants, newspapers and newscasters might present themselves as independent entities focused an a particular geography or demographic, but the viewpoints presented flow down from above. People who don’t play along find themselves not successful in their industry over time. Intense rhetoric between Fox News and MSNBC over how much the wealthy should pay on their income can be an orchestrated distraction from the wealthy not paying any tax at all because they effectively have no income. Facebook and Google can do the dirty work of suppressing viewpoints while anti-trust investigations plod along at a snails pace or issue only token findings. So it’s not like the countries where the tank rolls up to your front door and the storm troopers escort you and your family to new careers in the rock salt mines, but there are a lot of controls in place to guide the conversation and they are mostly implemented via the private sector. You may have thought you saw a UFO but Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey will make sure people know that what you actually saw was Venus.
unixhero 5y ago
I am a data scientist, at least in some projects. Data protection software has flagged me and caused major headaches because I have been in posesssion of "Canadian social security numbers". Blatantly false of course, my datasets with gigabytes of telco data contains many number combinations with an unfathomable number of permutations. Those false positives have been extremely annoying and a huge work to clear my name from at work. Needless to say I noped the fuck out of that company after enough of it. Will this AWS functionality become similar? Are they going to inspect all data at rest? Okay what about if I encrypt all data at rest then? RDS, Postgres can encrypt for instance. I have many questions.
- pmlnr 5y ago
  > I have many questions. Start buying hardware.
- carl_dr 5y ago
  > Are they going inspect all data at rest? From TFA : > When AWS Trust & Safety is made aware of abusive or illegal behavior on AWS services, they act quickly to investigate and engage with customers to take appropriate actions," AWS said in a statement. > "AWS Trust & Safety does not pre-review content hosted by our customers. As AWS continues to expand, we expect this team to continue to grow," it added.
ivanstame 5y ago
Boycott AWS!
josh_today 5y ago
Let’s say some move to self hosted, in a few years do ISPs decide they need to remove web access for content that violates their rules When will it end? Preventing someone from thoughts that violate?
switch007 5y ago
Seems like just another step in a recent coordinated global effort to censor online activity and destroy privacy.
tharne 5y ago
And remember, "violence" is whatever Amazon says it is. Heck some people even claim that failing to endorse a particular viewpoint, i.e. being silent on the matter, is itself a form of violence.

127 points by samizdis 5y ago

Easy solution any side can get on board with, for potentially different reasons: If a corporation receives tax or direct financial benefits from the US federal government, it must be bound by the same laws as the US federal government. Even the ones the US federal government ignores.

qweqwweqwe-90i 5y ago
Ok, then what do you do once all these companies stop doing business with the US government? The US government will find someone else to buy these services from - maybe they will have to pay more... no big deal. How is this a "solution"?
- Mountain_Skies 5y ago
  Governments pay more all the time for various social and political purposes. For Amazon and other tech companies "The government made us do it" is probably what they're after anyway. It allows them to service everyone and not have to face boycotts from anyone.
  - qweqwweqwe-90i 5y ago
    I think what the OP wants is amazon to not discriminate based on anything which would definitively lead to people boycotting them.
- goatcode 5y ago
  Drat, I didn't come up with a perfect plan, with no possible hypothetical what-if responses. Back to the drawing board. It's a solution to keep corporations that grow big enough to cause societal issues, having grown that big through utilizing society's resources, somewhat more accountable. There might be issues, but I'd suspect there to be more issues with the current solution: being "nothing."
nonameiguess 5y ago
The article is saying Amazon made news by shutting down an ISIS propaganda site celebrating a suicide bombing that killed 183 people last week. It's fairly likely the US federal government is at least exploring plans to find and kill whoever owned that site, so I don't see how holding Amazon to the same level of restriction as the US federal government makes a difference here. Freedom of speech doesn't give you freedom to use the Internet to plot a criminal conspiracy to kill US soldiers.
- refenestrator 5y ago
  Note that it's totally uncontroversial, bordering on mandatory, to support our return strike which killed dozens of people. Also firmly in bounds to insist we stay there and do it on a nightly basis, forever. Majority opinion of people with microphones. But the other guys? On the other side of the fight? Completely unconscionable to host any of their speech. We don't encourage violence.
- goatcode 5y ago
  I don't think the federal government is required by law to kill people.

josh_today 5y ago

Corporations’ digital rights are protected more than the individual. We need a digital bill of rights.

samizdis 5y ago
I've seen that call quite frequently in the past couple of years. Such as in a Guardian article [1], and from groups such as Neeva [2] - worth checking its "about" section [3] to see its backers etc. Also, I think, worth taking the sort of sceptical stance expressed in a Wired article [4] from 2019, What’s a Digital Bill of Rights Without Enforcement?, which points out that some players ostensibly backing digital rights are possibly wolves in sheep's clothing. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jan/28/americans-need-a-digital-bill-of-rights-heres-why https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jan/28/americ... [2] https://neeva.com/digital-bill-of-rights https://neeva.com/digital-bill-of-rights [3] https://neeva.com/about https://neeva.com/about [4] https://www.wired.com/story/whats-digital-bill-rights-without-enforcement/ https://www.wired.com/story/whats-digital-bill-rights-withou...
chrononaut 5y ago
> We need a digital bill of rights. What would be in such a digital bill of rights? (This is a bit vague for me to understand what you're necessarily advocating for)
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- jollybean 5y ago
  Things like right to privacy, the right to not be arbitrarily excluded from services esp. for things like political views, the 'right to be forgotten', transparency in terms of information sharing, clarity in billing, the right to delete accounts permanently, etc. etc.. I think such a thing is actually more important than the monopolizing issues of the FAANGS. Breaking them up might be a little nice, but as individuals we're beholden to the incredible gatekeeping of industry.
- 5y ago

Causality1 5y ago

Hosting the websites of terrorist groups is something few people would advocate, but the misinformation thing is beginning to really ride the line. Am I going to have to start worrying about whether my online backups have pirated music? If I see a piece of CSAM on Facebook and report it, should I worry about the copy of it in my browser cache being uploaded into my system backup?

Spooky23 5y ago
Yes. It’s the digital equivalent of having cocaine stuffed in your cars’ back seat. Doesn’t matter how it got there.
- FpUser 5y ago
  Actually it does. If you did not put it there but were instead set up good lawyer might be able to get you off the hook assuming you can afford good lawyer. The so called "equal" justice truly sucks. I once saw government trying to deny legal aid to person X on a basis that the offence is minor and the risk to be imprisoned is low, never mind the fact that having criminal record can completely screw person's life later on.
  - Spooky23 5y ago
    It all depends on the prosecutor. I served on a jury where a driver was being prosecuted for possession with intent to distribute for reasons nobody understood. The passenger, who wasn’t known to the driver, in the back seat confessed at the scene and plead guilty months earlier. It was obvious that something hinky was up. In this case, the jurors were all disgusted and found the guy not guilty. One of the jurors was a retired US Attorney who was upset enough that he submitted a complaint to the bar association. Justice was served, but going through a trial is a life altering experience.
    - FpUser 5y ago
      I wish the prosecutor was criminally charged with malicious prosecution and big compensation awarded to the driver so that the next time some scumbag trying to use justice system like this will think twice.

ajsnigrutin 5y ago

Here we go again... platform vs publisher... If you choose to decide what stays on your platform and what is removed, you should be responsible for the stuff that stays there. If you want to offload the liability to users/posters/commenters/..., then you should not be able to have agendas and decide what is removed (except for illegal stuff of course).

ceejayoz 5y ago
Stop trying to make this a thing. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/12/publisher-or-platform-it-doesnt-matter https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/12/publisher-or-platform-... > We’ll say it plainly here: there is no legal significance to labeling an online service a “platform” as opposed to a “publisher.” Yes. That’s right. There is no legal significance to labeling an online service a “platform.” Nor does the law treat online services differently based on their ideological “neutrality” or lack thereof.
- jollybean 5y ago
  That there is no legal distinction and Amazon may be within it's rights, doesn't make it right. Imagine if Amazon actually does start using political criteria for hosting services, and bans journalists speaking out against torture? Or suppresses sites hosting videos of police brutality? How high on the horse would the EFF be in this position? The EFF is correct to point out the legal situation in that there's no difference between a publisher and a platform etc. but this is going to get out of hand quickly as corporations start abusing their ability to filter data willy nilly. I think it also runs counter to the spirit of Net Neutrality and frankly hypocritical in this context. I don't trust for a moment that Verizon and A&T won't get into the business of messing with information as well to the extent that they have the power to do this. Our roads and infrastructure generally remain free of interference unless there's something very illegal going on, we ought to maintain some of these practices on the internet itself.
  - ceejayoz 5y ago
    You don't want it to become a thing, either. Section 230 protections enhance free speech on the internet, via the safe harbor provisions that allow places like Twitter and HN to function. Without it, you'd have vastly fewer places to publish your thoughts. Codifying a distinction between platform and publisher would require a place like HN to consider either shutting down comments and submissions entirely or abandoning any efforts at moderation. It would suck, royally.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y ago

> Amazon.com Inc (AMZN.O) plans to take a more proactive approach to determine what types of content violate its cloud service policies, such as rules against promoting violence, and enforce its removal, according to two sources, I am old enough to remember in the 1990's that a lot of people believed that video games promoted violence. I believe that once a technology becomes widespread enough to become infrastructure it needs to be regulated to allow fair access to it. See examples of railroads, phone lines, etc.

chrononaut 5y ago
Except in the case of hosting providers (and other services) you have options. A lot of options usually. At what point in the infrastructure stack would you draw the line? Something like AWS is far removed from the ultimate regulation that may it difficult to start such a competitor (running your own fiber?) Would SMS providers like twilio be considered the same, built on top of a regulated industry?
johnnyanmac 5y ago
TBF, everyone has fair access to whipping up any of hundreds of domain servers (including their own homespun server) and buying a domain name to direct to. No one company has a monopoly or oligopoly for creating a public website This isn't quite like citizens lobbying the government to restrict media. This is a private storage company adjusting their policies on what they allow to be stored on their servers.
- lostmsu 5y ago
  This is a "First they came for socialists" argument, but applied at independent levels of tech stack. - VM hosting - DNS hosting - ISP Where do we draw the line? I'd rather none of the above to be able to refuse service based on thought policing.
  - 8note 5y ago
    Banking? The Taliban should probably have access to both their websites and Afghanistan's wealth, regardless of whether their ideas are illegal in the states

pessimizer 5y ago

The internet has a new editor. Be prepared for your blog to be crawled by an AI for paragraphs that warrant further inspection by a minimum wage employee, and unappealable bans. I remember from a few years ago a well-regarded BASE jumper's passionate post on Facebook about wingsuits killing people, after the wingsuit-related death of another well-regarded BASE jumper he knew. IIRC he used the earnest rhetorical device of saying that he was glad his friend died so publicly, because it would stop young people getting into the sport from using wingsuits, because they were unreasonably dangerous. There was a lot of debate back and forth about wingsuits stimulated by the post (which was its purpose), but I was shocked for a different reason. Facebook deleted it, for saying that he was glad someone died. So now, the entire internet governed by the owner of the Washington Post. The idea that the west is intrinsically superior to China in terms of freedom and censorship is a joke. Our army of censors is as big as theirs, and we share technologies and methods.

jchw 5y ago
I was with you up until the end. Sorry, but that’s just ignorant.
chrononaut 5y ago
I don't quite understand the leaps of logic here, from an action that Facebook did, to how freedom and censorship in China is equivalent to those in the west. The best I can gather is that you're implying that _in practice_ the same level of censorship exists considering all actors involved? If that's the correct interpretation there is still a notable difference between what the government can coerce you to do, and what Facebook can coerce you. Isn't this why constitutional tenants (of freedom of speech) are important?
kragen 5y ago
To be fair, although the US has a larger percentage of its population imprisoned than China, its government is much less intrusive and permits a great deal more political dissent, for now.

ausbah 5y ago

this just seems like enhanced liability protection

YetAnotherNick 5y ago

But why? Why give away any money which you could take? Is it due to Amazon believing in morals(which is seemingly absent in the way they treat their own employees)? Is it because there are business who would caution away if there are specific content hosted there(which seems very unlikely as unlike social network all content are basically separated)? Or is it due to government pressure or regulation?

guerrilla 5y ago
> Is it due to Amazon believing in morals(which is seemingly absent in the way they treat their own employees)? What, no, that's insane. The theory I hear on here often is that they're trying to avoid regulation. I don't know if that's true but whatever they're doing, it's to avoid exposure potential costs. They've calculated that the lost business is worth less than the cost of whatever risks they forsee. Either that or they have some extremely powerful ideologues in control.
tablespoon 5y ago
> But why? Why give away any money which you could take? Is it due to Amazon believing in morals(which is seemingly absent in the way they treat their own employees)? F-ck no. It's because they don't want to end up in the news, getting called out for hosting that stuff. From the OP: > Activists and human rights groups are increasingly holding not just websites and apps accountable for harmful content, but also the underlying tech infrastructure that enables those sites to operate, while political conservatives decry the curtailing of free speech. Last week there was a Washington Post article about how they were hosting an ISIS website that celebrated the recent Kabul suicide bombing, and earlier this year they were getting flak for hosting Parler. They probably want to prevent that from happening again, or at least have something better to say when they get in the news for it.
revicon 5y ago
This is addressed in the article. It’s about avoiding public relation issues when they’re found hosting stuff that someone will find offensive… “ Better preparation against certain types of content could help Amazon avoid legal and public relations risk. "If (Amazon) can get some of this stuff off proactively before it's discovered and becomes a big news story, there's value in avoiding that reputational damage,"

rubyist5eva 5y ago

All hail Thought-Lord Bezos

tomohawk 5y ago

Yeah, because I trust amazon to know truth from fiction. I suppose it's a great move if you hate science. They'll base their decisions on what some 'authority' has to say about it, and the whole point of science is the belief that some authority may not actually know the truth.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

eplanit 5y ago

"Activists and human rights groups are increasingly holding not just websites and apps accountable for harmful content, but also the underlying tech infrastructure that enables those sites to operate, while political conservatives decry the curtailing of free speech." A very interesting quote, in that (a) it casts all those wanting censorship as "human rights groups" -- is that what Twitter mobs are called now?; also, (b) it's interesting how it's now the "political conservatives" decrying the curtailing of free speech, while the Left are ever expanding what is "harmful content" (a Newspeak phrase if there ever was one) and demanding it be censored.

kntmckenebrt 5y ago

Good. Now we need to get the banks to close the accounts of the creators, the computer makers to stop selling hardware to them or brick it remotely and the utilities to disconnect them. This would be much simpler if we had a list to put people on so that we could automate the steps.

dang 5y ago
Please stop posting flamebait to Hacker News. Also, could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix&page=0&query=community%20identity%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

cblconfederate 5y ago

Funny how amazon or google were never investigated for years about the tons of pirated content they host, yet tiny hosting sites are being shut down before they even start.

lelanthran 5y ago
> Funny how amazon or google were never investigated for years about the tons of pirated content they host, yet tiny hosting sites are being shut down before they even start. It's called "pulling up the ladder behind you". The US did it with patents - for tens of decades the US just ignored patent law (read up on why Hollywood was founded). Once they had enough patents, they started rigorously enforcing it around the world so other countries would have to pay a tax for using knowledge. Most large corporations today are where they are because they were not tightly regulated when small, once they got big they pushed for regulations that were onerous for small companies, hence introducing an artificial barrier that prevents competitors to them from starting off the same way they did. The "#MeToo" movement looked like much of the same as well - a lot of young men and women in Hollywood got their start from the casting couch. By taking away that option (not that they succeeded, as far as I know) they ensure that there are fewer younger and more attractive competitors. "Pull up the ladder behind you" is an old and viable strategy that applies almost anywhere there is competition, and the intention is to reduce competition by making sure that future competition cannot use the same easy channels to success that the ladder-puller did.

malwrar 5y ago

AWS isn't unique anymore and charges far more than other hosting providers (especially if you consider bandwidth). Modern software deployment solutions are quickly negating the cost-savings and convenience of autoscaling too. This just leaves AWS with a variety of unique, overpriced, yet convenient services and their popularity as their only noteworthy selling points. My bet is that they'll end up banning the wrong customer(s) and gain a reputation for being an unreliable partner compared to other hosts, excited to watch that happen. There's also a huge risk in my mind that catering to Twitter mobs and politicians making regulatory threats will become normal as a result of this, but who knows what the zeitgeist will be in 5 years. I'll be remembering this forever though.

kragen 5y ago
More likely, non-AWS cloud providers will either fall in line or get tarred as being the Gab/Parler of hosting services, stigmatizing whoever uses them. This will lead to people moving to AWS or another cloud provider that "removes more content" in order to avoid having their site blocked from Facebook sharing, Google search, Gmail, Twitter, etc.
- throwawaysea 5y ago
  I think this generalizes further too. Any incumbent group that holds power (or its supporters) will assail newcomers as being [something bad]. For instance, those on the political left, which is supported in kind by big tech, might attack some new social media platform as a haven for white supremacists. The charge doesn’t have to be true - it just has to stick in order to scare everyone who fears that label away, and the damage is done. Users, advertisers, web hosts, app stores, and so on will all abandon the platform. It’s an effective way to keep power on the side of the incumbents.
  - kragen 5y ago
    Right, of course. That's how most of civilization worked for 3000 years until we invented liberalism in the 01700s: if you pled for mercy for the heretics or argued that we should hear them out, you were a heretic too. It's a major reason progress was so slow. One of the charges against Socrates at his trial was that he claimed that the Sun was not actually divine, but merely natural matter such as a stone, a charge he denied. Hopefully we can find a way to preserve some sort of enclave of liberalism despite the US abandoning it.

neonate 5y ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20210903022509/https://www.reuters.com/technology/exclusive-amazon-proactively-remove-more-content-that-violates-rules-cloud-2021-09-02/ https://web.archive.org/web/20210903022509/https://www.reute... https://archive.is/G2h30 https://archive.is/G2h30

collsni 5y ago

It is interesting to see the general community turn against cloud. I mean they own the platform, what did you expect? This is the same argument of businesses requiring masks. I've been working to get everything of mine out of the cloud for a few years now and am pretty happy about most of the open source products I host.

iammisc 5y ago

Glad I dumped cloud and self host. $200/month plus fixed capital costs for a bit of rack space and equipment. With kubernetes, nix, and open source aws replacements, I'm paying less and have way more room for scalability. In my own experience, I am glad more and more social media are silencing conservative voices. We get to move to newer platforms where we don't need to put up with the brigading. Eventually the old ones will go the way of myspace. I see Amazon web services going the same way.

kragen 5y ago
It's only a matter of time until your rack space provider feels pressure to enforce similar rules. Instead of looking to Kubernetes, Nix, and OpenStack, you should be looking to Tor, Bitcoin, and BitTorrent. Silencing voices is generally a big part of what conservatism is all about: in order to securely establish inherited privileges, it must silence whoever credibly criticizes them.
- djrogers 5y ago
  > Silencing voices is generally a big part of what conservatism is all about The same can be said for the modern Marxist movement, progressivism, and the social justice movement. Trying to paint the loss of liberty and liberalism as the fault of only one of the two big political parties is folly.
  - kragen 5y ago
    I agree, but the parent was talking about conservatism, not Marxism or progressivism, and I didn't want to degrade the conversation with whataboutism. I've elaborated on that theme at greater length in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28401596 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28401596.
- cblconfederate 5y ago
  there 's a lot more competition on the rack space though, they are not limited to a cartel of 3
- 5y ago

kodah 5y ago

> Amazon made headlines in the Washington Post last week for shutting down a website hosted on AWS that featured propaganda from Islamic State that celebrated the suicide bombing that killed an estimated 170 Afghans and 13 U.S. troops in Kabul last Thursday. They did so after the news organization contacted Amazon, according to the Post. I'll preface this with the fact that I served in the war on terror. I don't think AWS should. The government is the arbiter of what is legal and not legal. This whole concept that people have built on over decades that "free speech means you won't be oppressed by the government but not that you won't face 'consequences'" is an absolute farce. If our "values" were ever equally enforced then the day Trump was thrown off of Twitter for his amping of radical right wingers that caused an insurrection then Malang Khostay would've been thrown off as well for being the actual spokesperson of the Taliban. It is the government's job to determine minimally viable standards and attempt to compel enforcement, as soon as you make "values" the arbiter people stop baking cakes for gay people and think it's okay.

throwaway210222 5y ago
> free speech means you won't be oppressed by the government but not that you won't face 'consequences'" is an absolute farce. By that definition there is free speech in North Korea.
- kodah 5y ago
  A little different I'd argue. People are talking about private citizens and companies enforcing extra-legal standards on you.
- zxcvbn4038 5y ago
  The loophole in the US has always been the private sector. Most mass media is controlled by a handful of individuals who play along nicely with what the government wants, newspapers and newscasters might present themselves as independent entities focused an a particular geography or demographic, but the viewpoints presented flow down from above. People who don’t play along find themselves not successful in their industry over time. Intense rhetoric between Fox News and MSNBC over how much the wealthy should pay on their income can be an orchestrated distraction from the wealthy not paying any tax at all because they effectively have no income. Facebook and Google can do the dirty work of suppressing viewpoints while anti-trust investigations plod along at a snails pace or issue only token findings. So it’s not like the countries where the tank rolls up to your front door and the storm troopers escort you and your family to new careers in the rock salt mines, but there are a lot of controls in place to guide the conversation and they are mostly implemented via the private sector. You may have thought you saw a UFO but Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey will make sure people know that what you actually saw was Venus.

unixhero 5y ago

I am a data scientist, at least in some projects. Data protection software has flagged me and caused major headaches because I have been in posesssion of "Canadian social security numbers". Blatantly false of course, my datasets with gigabytes of telco data contains many number combinations with an unfathomable number of permutations. Those false positives have been extremely annoying and a huge work to clear my name from at work. Needless to say I noped the fuck out of that company after enough of it. Will this AWS functionality become similar? Are they going to inspect all data at rest? Okay what about if I encrypt all data at rest then? RDS, Postgres can encrypt for instance. I have many questions.

pmlnr 5y ago
> I have many questions. Start buying hardware.
carl_dr 5y ago
> Are they going inspect all data at rest? From TFA : > When AWS Trust & Safety is made aware of abusive or illegal behavior on AWS services, they act quickly to investigate and engage with customers to take appropriate actions," AWS said in a statement. > "AWS Trust & Safety does not pre-review content hosted by our customers. As AWS continues to expand, we expect this team to continue to grow," it added.

ivanstame 5y ago

Boycott AWS!

josh_today 5y ago

Let’s say some move to self hosted, in a few years do ISPs decide they need to remove web access for content that violates their rules When will it end? Preventing someone from thoughts that violate?

switch007 5y ago

Seems like just another step in a recent coordinated global effort to censor online activity and destroy privacy.

tharne 5y ago

And remember, "violence" is whatever Amazon says it is. Heck some people even claim that failing to endorse a particular viewpoint, i.e. being silent on the matter, is itself a form of violence.