4 ms·

> Sometimes companies have even been destroyed, notably by Amazon, for having the wrong political viewpoints. Ok, I'll ask: what company did Amazon destroy for

> Sometimes companies have even been destroyed, notably by Amazon, for having the wrong political viewpoints. Ok, I'll ask: what company did Amazon destroy for having the wrong political viewpoint? AWS hosts some pretty vile stuff without blinking. The last time a company made a big "woe is me, my ideas are being suppressed" claim against Amazon, it was Parler, and they weren't kicked off for their viewpoints. They were kicked off for operating a crime-ridden site with zero effective moderation.

kurisufag 2y ago
never forget that Old Cloudflare kept lulzsec's site up /while they were defacing .gov pages/, then gave a talk at DEF CON about how they managed it. we can have better standards for speech and platforming than "you didn't moderate enough".
- madeofpalk 2y ago
  Cloudflare is AWS?
  - kurisufag 2y ago
    why should pre-2016 cloudflare be the only company with a commitment to free speech and platforming?
    - mullingitover 2y ago
      I read up on that situation, and it sounded like the three letter agencies were working with Cloudflare all along. They never even asked them nicely to stop hosting lulzsec. To top it off, Sabu from lulzsec was an informer[1]. So Cloudflare wasn't bravely standing on principle, they were just doing garden variety collaboration with the feds. [1] https://www.computerworld.com/article/1386577/us-seeks-leniency-for-sabu-lulzsec-leader-turned-snitch.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/1386577/us-seeks-lenie...
Spivak 2y ago
Look, they were kicked off for their content. I hesitate to call their content "viewpoints" but it's become roughly synonymous with speech so I guess it kinda fits. Regardless, I'm happy they did it. I think there is room for "exception that proves the rule" type behavior. When the bridge too far is literal Nazis I'm okay with considering AWS to still be politically neutral. No ToS violation (which was flimsy at best) needed.
- mullingitover 2y ago
  I didn't realize that death threats were a viewpoint.[1] > People on Parler used the social network to stoke fear, spread hate, and allegedly coordinate the insurrection at the Capitol building on Wednesday. The app has recently been overrun with death threats, celebrations of violence, and posts encouraging “Patriots” to march on Washington, DC, with weapons on Jan. 19, the day before the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden. > In an email obtained by BuzzFeed News, an AWS Trust and Safety team told Parler Chief Policy Officer Amy Peikoff that the calls for violence propagating across the social network violated its terms of service. Amazon said it was unconvinced that the service’s plan to use volunteers to moderate calls for violence and hate speech would be effective. Parler was used to coordinate the Jan 6 attacks, and when they were caught with their pants down they promised some half baked scheme to have unpaid volunteers do moderation. It was demonstrably a joke and they were caught failing to moderate more attack planning that was happening out in the open on their app. I think Parler leadership got off easy on this, they frankly should've been in jail on January 7th for being accomplices and not merely getting kicked off AWS. [1] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/johnpaczkowski/amazon-parler-aws https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/johnpaczkowski/amazon-p...
  - mardifoufs 2y ago
    The death threats angle is a complete red herring, considering that other social media absolutely does leave out such posts for even longer than parler did (and very rarely is held accountable for whatever their users are posting, even when it takes literal months to moderate). But regarding your last paragraph. Sure let's agree that everything you said was right. So what? It still shows that AWS does cut off consumers based on politics. I'm not aware of any legal action against Parler so I don't think they were accused of anything illegal. The fact that you agree with the political reasoning behind the decision does not make it any less political. Especially since the only time that they ever intervened for something like this was when it happened in the US. It didn't happen during the Arab Spring, or the 2014 Ukrainian revolution, or any other time where people used an AWS hosted platform to coordinate a coup.
jasonvorhe 2y ago
They quickly kicked off WikiLeaks under political pressure.
- aaronbrethorst 2y ago
  AWS’s stated reasons seem pretty sound to me: https://aws.amazon.com/message/65348/ https://aws.amazon.com/message/65348/
  - mardifoufs 2y ago
    Okay, so what? That you agree with the political motivation behind the decision does not make the decision any less politically motivated, proving that AWS does in fact kick out consumers based on politics.
    - aaronbrethorst 2y ago
      just because you say it was politically motivated doesn't make it so.
      - quantadev 2y ago
        The fact that people will disagree about what's political and what isn't is precisely why censorship, in general, is illegal. Because when people have power over others (including censorship power) it's guaranteed they'll abuse it, even if simply by being convinced their own interpretation of reality is correct.
      - mardifoufs 2y ago
        They literally say it is! In the very article they state that the documents will end up hurting american interests. How is that not political?
        aaronbrethorst 2y ago
        "They literally say it is!" They literally do not say it is. Citation needed. Quote what you're referring to.
quantadev 2y ago
[flagged]
- callalex 2y ago
  Can you provide specific examples of censorship based on Republican political views? I haven’t experienced that on the platforms you mentioned.
  - quantadev 2y ago
    Oh sure, that's easy info to provide for you. Almost EVERY single conservative that was kicked off Twitter (before Musk bought it) was kicked for perfectly legal, and often perfectly polite, political speech.
Moto7451 2y ago
I don’t know about the political stuff that poster is talking about but this is true for quite a few small stores that transitioned to mail order as Amazon really took off. If you couldn’t handle complaints quickly enough or had too many flagged listings (stuff Amazon didn’t want to allow on the platform for one reason or another) you could get kicked off without much recourse except trying to open a new account and hope you were not caught. You could see this as good for the consumer in cases where the abuse is bad but the store I was at in the 00s got kicked off for selling some Martial Arts equipment legal in 47 States but on a naughty list we were unaware of. We listed it in a few colors and that was enough to get kicked out.
- kayodelycaon 2y ago
  AWS and the Amazon store are completely different services. People get kicked off the store for stupid reasons every day.
TwiztidK 2y ago
Not too long after Parler was kicked off AWS, I was on a call with hundreds of representatives from power utilities about a modeling tool we were transitioning to. It was mentioned that the tool was hosted on AWS and someone suggested they have a fallback plan in case they got kicked off like "other companies".
- quantadev 2y ago
  Any company that's conservative-oriented in any way is coming under attack.
  - mullingitover 2y ago
    Elon Musk's companies are doing great under the democratic administration he publicly rails against. He's back on top of the richest list. Peter Thiel's portfolio seems to be doing great. PLTR is up 350% in the past five years. Facebook altered it's policies in a pro-conservative way by allowing falsehoods in political ads, and they're doing fine. Right-wing content has flourished there for years. Oracle and Larry Ellison are doing better than ever. Rupert Murdoch and News Corp are financially healthy and not in crisis. Now twitter is doing badly, but that's not because of their political slant, it's because they're operating the business with ideology first, business acumen second approach. That's not politics, that's plain old bad execution.
    - quantadev 2y ago
      None of that is evidence conservatives aren't under attack, it's evidence that we're winning the culture war. About Musk, once he took over Twitter, that mostly solved the Social Media "Free Speech" problem, because as long as the most popular gathering place in the world is free we're [mostly] all free. So you're right, there's lots of reasons for Conservative optimism.
      - mullingitover 2y ago
        > None of that is evidence conservatives aren't under attack, it's evidence that we're winning the culture war. None of those businesses are part of the culture war, or if anything they're 'woke' businesses. Thiel doesn't make money being conservative, he makes money on venture capital and running a big government surveillance business. Larry Ellison makes money price gouging on licensing. Elon Musk's main source of income is a 'woke' EV business. Rupert Murdoch makes money on tabloids, of which Fox News is just one flavor - and the tabloids are arguably 'woke' as they mainly pitch conspiracy theories that the 'normies' don't know about. Twitter under Musk is no more free speech than it has ever been. They comply with the vast majority of censorship requests from authoritarian governments[1]. They most recently rolled over for Brazil's demands and are now fumbling their execution on paying the fines Brazil levied against them. Musk also censored Ken Klippenstein's account when he published a link to his Substack article about the JD Vance opposition research dump. So no, "free speech" on Twitter is just a slogan and a marketing campaign for low information news consumers, and it's working. [1] https://english.elpais.com/international/2023-05-24/under-elon-musk-twitter-has-approved-83-of-censorship-requests-by-authoritarian-governments.html https://english.elpais.com/international/2023-05-24/under-el...

kurisufag 2y ago

never forget that Old Cloudflare kept lulzsec's site up /while they were defacing .gov pages/, then gave a talk at DEF CON about how they managed it. we can have better standards for speech and platforming than "you didn't moderate enough".

madeofpalk 2y ago
Cloudflare is AWS?
- kurisufag 2y ago
  why should pre-2016 cloudflare be the only company with a commitment to free speech and platforming?
  - mullingitover 2y ago
    I read up on that situation, and it sounded like the three letter agencies were working with Cloudflare all along. They never even asked them nicely to stop hosting lulzsec. To top it off, Sabu from lulzsec was an informer[1]. So Cloudflare wasn't bravely standing on principle, they were just doing garden variety collaboration with the feds. [1] https://www.computerworld.com/article/1386577/us-seeks-leniency-for-sabu-lulzsec-leader-turned-snitch.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/1386577/us-seeks-lenie...

Spivak 2y ago

Look, they were kicked off for their content. I hesitate to call their content "viewpoints" but it's become roughly synonymous with speech so I guess it kinda fits. Regardless, I'm happy they did it. I think there is room for "exception that proves the rule" type behavior. When the bridge too far is literal Nazis I'm okay with considering AWS to still be politically neutral. No ToS violation (which was flimsy at best) needed.

mullingitover 2y ago
I didn't realize that death threats were a viewpoint.[1] > People on Parler used the social network to stoke fear, spread hate, and allegedly coordinate the insurrection at the Capitol building on Wednesday. The app has recently been overrun with death threats, celebrations of violence, and posts encouraging “Patriots” to march on Washington, DC, with weapons on Jan. 19, the day before the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden. > In an email obtained by BuzzFeed News, an AWS Trust and Safety team told Parler Chief Policy Officer Amy Peikoff that the calls for violence propagating across the social network violated its terms of service. Amazon said it was unconvinced that the service’s plan to use volunteers to moderate calls for violence and hate speech would be effective. Parler was used to coordinate the Jan 6 attacks, and when they were caught with their pants down they promised some half baked scheme to have unpaid volunteers do moderation. It was demonstrably a joke and they were caught failing to moderate more attack planning that was happening out in the open on their app. I think Parler leadership got off easy on this, they frankly should've been in jail on January 7th for being accomplices and not merely getting kicked off AWS. [1] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/johnpaczkowski/amazon-parler-aws https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/johnpaczkowski/amazon-p...
- mardifoufs 2y ago
  The death threats angle is a complete red herring, considering that other social media absolutely does leave out such posts for even longer than parler did (and very rarely is held accountable for whatever their users are posting, even when it takes literal months to moderate). But regarding your last paragraph. Sure let's agree that everything you said was right. So what? It still shows that AWS does cut off consumers based on politics. I'm not aware of any legal action against Parler so I don't think they were accused of anything illegal. The fact that you agree with the political reasoning behind the decision does not make it any less political. Especially since the only time that they ever intervened for something like this was when it happened in the US. It didn't happen during the Arab Spring, or the 2014 Ukrainian revolution, or any other time where people used an AWS hosted platform to coordinate a coup.

jasonvorhe 2y ago

They quickly kicked off WikiLeaks under political pressure.

aaronbrethorst 2y ago
AWS’s stated reasons seem pretty sound to me: https://aws.amazon.com/message/65348/ https://aws.amazon.com/message/65348/
- mardifoufs 2y ago
  Okay, so what? That you agree with the political motivation behind the decision does not make the decision any less politically motivated, proving that AWS does in fact kick out consumers based on politics.
  - aaronbrethorst 2y ago
    just because you say it was politically motivated doesn't make it so.
    - quantadev 2y ago
      The fact that people will disagree about what's political and what isn't is precisely why censorship, in general, is illegal. Because when people have power over others (including censorship power) it's guaranteed they'll abuse it, even if simply by being convinced their own interpretation of reality is correct.
    - mardifoufs 2y ago
      They literally say it is! In the very article they state that the documents will end up hurting american interests. How is that not political?
      - aaronbrethorst 2y ago
        "They literally say it is!" They literally do not say it is. Citation needed. Quote what you're referring to.

quantadev 2y ago

[flagged]

callalex 2y ago
Can you provide specific examples of censorship based on Republican political views? I haven’t experienced that on the platforms you mentioned.
- quantadev 2y ago
  Oh sure, that's easy info to provide for you. Almost EVERY single conservative that was kicked off Twitter (before Musk bought it) was kicked for perfectly legal, and often perfectly polite, political speech.

Moto7451 2y ago

I don’t know about the political stuff that poster is talking about but this is true for quite a few small stores that transitioned to mail order as Amazon really took off. If you couldn’t handle complaints quickly enough or had too many flagged listings (stuff Amazon didn’t want to allow on the platform for one reason or another) you could get kicked off without much recourse except trying to open a new account and hope you were not caught. You could see this as good for the consumer in cases where the abuse is bad but the store I was at in the 00s got kicked off for selling some Martial Arts equipment legal in 47 States but on a naughty list we were unaware of. We listed it in a few colors and that was enough to get kicked out.

kayodelycaon 2y ago
AWS and the Amazon store are completely different services. People get kicked off the store for stupid reasons every day.

TwiztidK 2y ago

Not too long after Parler was kicked off AWS, I was on a call with hundreds of representatives from power utilities about a modeling tool we were transitioning to. It was mentioned that the tool was hosted on AWS and someone suggested they have a fallback plan in case they got kicked off like "other companies".

quantadev 2y ago
Any company that's conservative-oriented in any way is coming under attack.
- mullingitover 2y ago
  Elon Musk's companies are doing great under the democratic administration he publicly rails against. He's back on top of the richest list. Peter Thiel's portfolio seems to be doing great. PLTR is up 350% in the past five years. Facebook altered it's policies in a pro-conservative way by allowing falsehoods in political ads, and they're doing fine. Right-wing content has flourished there for years. Oracle and Larry Ellison are doing better than ever. Rupert Murdoch and News Corp are financially healthy and not in crisis. Now twitter is doing badly, but that's not because of their political slant, it's because they're operating the business with ideology first, business acumen second approach. That's not politics, that's plain old bad execution.
  - quantadev 2y ago
    None of that is evidence conservatives aren't under attack, it's evidence that we're winning the culture war. About Musk, once he took over Twitter, that mostly solved the Social Media "Free Speech" problem, because as long as the most popular gathering place in the world is free we're [mostly] all free. So you're right, there's lots of reasons for Conservative optimism.
    - mullingitover 2y ago
      > None of that is evidence conservatives aren't under attack, it's evidence that we're winning the culture war. None of those businesses are part of the culture war, or if anything they're 'woke' businesses. Thiel doesn't make money being conservative, he makes money on venture capital and running a big government surveillance business. Larry Ellison makes money price gouging on licensing. Elon Musk's main source of income is a 'woke' EV business. Rupert Murdoch makes money on tabloids, of which Fox News is just one flavor - and the tabloids are arguably 'woke' as they mainly pitch conspiracy theories that the 'normies' don't know about. Twitter under Musk is no more free speech than it has ever been. They comply with the vast majority of censorship requests from authoritarian governments[1]. They most recently rolled over for Brazil's demands and are now fumbling their execution on paying the fines Brazil levied against them. Musk also censored Ken Klippenstein's account when he published a link to his Substack article about the JD Vance opposition research dump. So no, "free speech" on Twitter is just a slogan and a marketing campaign for low information news consumers, and it's working. [1] https://english.elpais.com/international/2023-05-24/under-elon-musk-twitter-has-approved-83-of-censorship-requests-by-authoritarian-governments.html https://english.elpais.com/international/2023-05-24/under-el...