Glenn Greenwald has been investigating the planning of the Capitol protests and says "it was largely done on Facebook". So far he hasn't been able to identify a single person who was arrested and active on Parler:
> Do you know how many of the people arrested in connection with the Capitol invasion were active users of Parler? Zero. The planning was largely done on Facebook. This is all a bullshit pretext for silencing competitors on ideological grounds: just the start.
> For those asking the basis for that last claim: I spent the weekend reporting on the removal of Parler from the internet, including reviewing lots of documents and interviewing people associated with the companies involved, including Parler.
I would be more interested in hearing if all these prominent figures in the Capitol protests were active across multiple (or all) social media platforms, which often seems to be the case. If that is true, then it makes for an even stronger argument that Parler has been singled out.
And his claim was refuted in mere minutes. An extremely disingenuous argument on his behalf.
Glenn has done great work in the past for which he should be commended, but these days he's a contrarian in search of hot takes. It's just how the Twitter / Patreon journalist economy operates. He will throw a huge hissy fit about the mainstream media but then happily go on Fox News with Tucker.
I agree with this take on Greewald. That Twitter thread, and his recent substack article, is effectively attacking private property, and implying that corporations ought to be compelled to transmit and amplify all speech. According to greewald, if I send a letter to the editor to the New York Times, and it’s not published, that’s a violation of my free speech. Patent nonsense.
When has he done great work in the past? His coverage of the Snowden documents was so bad that people who read his articles understood less about what was in the documents than people who didn't. For example, he still hasn't issued a correction for his PRISM reporting.
Nah I disagree. He used to truly dive into the story regardless of ideology. It was about the truth and the facts of the case. Specifically, his writing on the Anthrax case is top-tier journalism. He also bravely defended Nazis in court and stood up for their rights, which I deeply respect (and a totally different scenario than the current Parler debacle).
But having said that, it's clear lately he puts politics / optics first and then dives into an issue.
If you're feeling lazy, it's also easier to find those posts on Facebook because that's where everyone is (network effect). Parlor was poised to capitalize on discontent with the social media companies that were banning Trump but the influx of users was just starting.
This is almost certainly false. For example, see the arrest of the leader of the Proud Boys (for events prior to Capitol, but played active role on Parler encouraging proud boys violence that day):
And if he was arrested prior that indicates some awareness in advance of what might have unfolded. I’m probably alone in the opinion that it shouldn’t have been given the go ahead, especially amidst a pandemic. Protests seem unreasonably dangerous in today’s world.
>> Do you know how many of the people arrested in connection with the Capitol invasion were active users of Parler? Zero. The planning was largely done on Facebook. This is all a bullshit pretext for silencing competitors on ideological grounds: just the start.
> This is almost certainly false. For example, see the arrest of the leader of the Proud Boys (for events prior to Capitol, but played active role on Parler encouraging proud boys violence that day):
> Those alternative social media sites were rife with Trump supporters organizing and communicating on Wednesday. On Parler, one trending hashtag was #stormthecapitol. Many Trump supporters on the sites also appeared to believe a false rumor that Antifa, a left-wing movement, was responsible for committing violence at the protests.
> “WAKE UP AMERICA, IT’S ANTIFA and BLM operatives who are committing the violence, NOT TRUMP SUPPORTERS!,” said one Parler account member called @Trumpfans100, offering no evidence for the claims.
Even though Greenwald is wrong, he's not totally wrong. I think he's correct that the "majority" of the planning happened on Facebook, but that was kind of a funnel to Parler. My understanding is that was mostly for seemingly legit stuff, event for protests, was done on Facebook. Those pages then linked to Parler, where more extreme planning took place, out-of-reach from Facebook's policies.
>For example, see the arrest of the leader of the Proud Boys (for events prior to Capitol, but played active role on Parler encouraging proud boys violence that day)
You seem to be talking about Enrique Tarrio, the latino leader of the "Proud Boys" who was arrested when he stepped off his plane, for the crime of burning a blm symbol in DC the month before.
> Glenn Greenwald has been investigating the planning of the Capitol protests and says "it was largely done on Facebook".
Glenn Greenwald also chose to make the fake Giuliani/Hunter Biden laptop story the hill on which he wished to die upon, related to his resignation from the Intercept, so whatever credibility he had remaining has long since departed.
Yep. Turn on anyone who doesn't support the narrative. So sad to see someone who has been so principled for so long on all the modern topics we should care about get viciously character assasinated so readily by people without a moments hesitancy. I have had my disagreements with GG, particularly in his naive taking on of PO for the money, but this refusal to acknowledge both his dedication to truth (which often makes him look contrarian) and how correct he has been on those topics just speaks volumes about how deeply ingrained the crazy is for those who decide he's persona-non-grata due to not supporting their favorite conspiracy theories.
The same kind of people now openly railing against GG are the same kind of people who will do everything they can to not acknowledge Ray McGovern because his professional and personal past make him a harder target on the topic. Of course, it wouldn't surprise me to see plenty of them try the same charater assasination on him, but it's an obvious marker of complete rejection of truth in favor of tribalisms.
Disgusting seeing so many turn on GG et al so quickly. Ya'll should be ashamed of yourselves.
Thats a mischaraterization at best, which is sort of my point. What GG said and his real positions don't matter. What matters is he bucked the narrative (mostly when he pushed against the propaganda push that the HB laptop leak was of Russian origin) and that made him bad, and then the justifications for his "bad" label were found afterwards. They don't hold up to scrutiny but the character assassination is done already.
In his own words:
“I don’t think that the emails — so far — reveal a huge scandal. They so far just establish standard sleaze and DC corruption. The huge scandal to me is the blatant rank-closing and cone of silence — a prohibition — erected by journalists around this story to defend Biden,”
“Is there a single journalist willing to say with a straight face they believe the emails relating to the Bidens are either fabricated or otherwise fraudulently altered, but the Bidens just aren’t saying so?,”
“When you report a huge archive, there’s no way to prove the negative that none of it is altered. You investigate & confirm as much as you can, then use your journalistic judgment. The only way you get confirmation is when the subjects of the reporting don’t deny the authenticity,”
“You know the subjects of the reporting will immediately claim they’re fake if the are. Of course they will: that would kill the reporting!”
“There’s a reason the Bidens aren’t claiming they’re fake,”
I have followed GG's writing for over 10 years myself, actually reading his articles as opposed to twitter headlines, and I think its telling after the effort I went trhough to try to have a real conversation, that is your response.
Downvote all you want Biden lackies, it doesnt change the uncomfortable facts!
Not true at all. I bet you even think you know what my political identity (what a horrid combination of words!) is just because of the phrase, but in all probability you are wrong. On the contrary, I came with quotes from the man the discussion was about, you are the one who came with comments of no substance.
True enough, I should have phrased it better, and just not said anything at all (bad form on hn to talk about downvotes), but on a topic about someone I respect immensely I got frustrated to see downvotes used in leui of discussion. I do think downvotes on the topic are highly probable to be from people who support Biden, which I didn't, (not a Trump supporter either, and I hate that I need to quantify like that), but it doesnt really matter. Hn is about elevating the convo, not devolving it. Sorry, my bad.
His point all along was "The laptop isn't a big deal, the censorship is". I don't know the details regarding Hunter Biden's business dealings or his laptop (although I've heard there is at least one ongoing investigation, possibly more), but the censorship is probably one of the bigger stories of the year. Twitter admitted they were blocking the story prior to fact-checking, and this decision was made by someone who had previously worked for the DCCC:
> While I will intentionally not link to the New York Post, I want be clear that this story is eligible to be fact checked by Facebook's third-party fact checking partners. In the meantime, we are reducing its distribution on our platform.
Good point, I had forgotten that Rob of Errata Security was given an email to verify and it was proven to be legitimate:
> So as I blogged before, the emails contained DKIM information, which the original reporters could and should have verified. So I eventually got a copy of the email and run DKIM verification on it. It passed:
Strange that Rob doesn't mention the possibility that the private key was compromised. What the DKIM signature really proves is the date the message was sent, not who composed the message.
I agree that is a possibility, but he probably didn't mention it because it's so remote. When you have someone's laptop with a bunch of private sexual photos, reams of PII and emails, and you can verify with witnesses and crypto that the emails check out, the rational explanation is "maybe the laptop is real" rather than "maybe Google got hacked six years ago and the extremely valuable private keys were saved for this".
That is, I do agree with you and your technical analysis, but don't see the point of nitpicking his Twitter reporting. I think if you're on Twitter, you already know that you're not getting every little detail of a story.
Exactly, and weeks after the story broke, it was revealed the FBI was actively investigating Hunter Biden.
You can also download all the uncensored photos on many leak websites. The photos are clearly Hunter Biden in many sexually explicit positions (although none of them appear to be underage as was suggested by some).
I think there is a prima fascia case against Hunter for his ties to Burisma and his appointment being purely for political clout and a power move; a move that should be investigated for possible direct security risks to the American government and the American people.
> For a start, the silencing competitors argument doesn't really work with AWS because they just do hosting.
The complaint alleges there are deeper ties:
Less than a month ago, AWS announced with a press release a new multi-year deal with Twitter. AWS will “provide global cloud infrastructure to deliver Twitter timelines.” Twitter Selects AWS as Strategic Provider to Serve Timelines, Press Center, Amazon, (Dec. 15, 2020), https://press.aboutamazon.com/news-releases/news-release-det....
That's a pretty typical-looking big customer kind of arrangement for a cloud provider (including the press release), not anything seemingly deeper than typical. (To be clear, I have no inside info on this deal to know for sure, but I've worked in the past at a different big cloud provider and later at a big customer of that cloud provider.)
That's definitely possible. I have no direct knowledge of the agreement, but it's one of those things that will get sussed out later--I suspect that the precise nature of the agreement will be gone over in detail.
That doesn't actually allege there are deeper ties. It's a pretty standard corporate PR piece about $SUPPLIER providing $SERVICE to $BIG_CUSTOMER, that $SUPPLIER can turn around and shop to other $PROSPECTIVE_CUSTOMERs as evidence of their ability to handle their needs. The company I work for puts this kind of PR out all the time, and no one thinks that it's a conspiracy to shut out all other competitors to $BIG_CUSTOMER.
On the other hand: the larger Twitter is, the easier it is for them to bargain hard with Amazon. A world with multiple competing Twitter-like services is potentially better for Amazon's bottom line.
That's a shame, because Greenwald and other contrarian writers have been the only ones consistently right the last few years with regards to Russiagate and other "emotional" headline issues.
Greenwald has actually been consistently wrong on quite a lot on that topic - mentioned quite a few places on the Wikipedia article actually.
I should stress that some partisan democrats have also been just as wrong, but Greenwald is just making it up to downplay what did actually happen.
To anyone who hasn't, please go and read the Wiki article on it - it's very detailed and clears up a lot of frankly worrying narratives I see on this website that are frankly a little disappointing considering the average reader is usually quite fastidious with technology.
Hard to confirm at the moment with Parler gone, but all the stories I've found seem to indicate he was mostly active on Twitter.
I think a more interesting (and neutral) approach for Greenwald to take would be to show that all of these prominent figures were most likely active on ALL social media platforms, yet only Parler has been singled out.
Glenn is hiding behind the "were arrested" phrasing, so despite the fact that baked alaska has a parler account and was literally livestreaming from the capital he doesn't count in Glenn's opinion as he hasn't been arrested yet.
What Glenn is saying is technically true, but also complete garbage. It's meant to fool people who can't do the minimum levels of research.
Ah yes, good point. I mentioned that elsewhere in the thread… but I guess I forgot when I started doing my own research, because the notion that you could livestream your participation in a terrorist attack at the Capitol and not get arrested immediately is absolutely bananas.
Also, here are some screen grabs of Kevin Greeson, who likely would have been arrested, but had a heart attack from what I have heard termed "insurrectionary excitement"
Also what does it matter if Jan 6 was not planned on parler? Jan 17th and inauguration shenanigans were being planned there until the site got yanked.
Hard to tell now that it’s down. But I find it pretty hard to trust him on this. One, it’s been fairly well documented that people were organizing the attack on Parler [1]. And two, as I mentioned elsewhere in the thread, there’s the obvious loophole that many who participated in the attack simply haven’t been arrested at all.
Tell that to my favorite ice cream shop that was smashed to bits on Melrose. Or the synagogues on Fairfax that were defiled. Or the vehicles all over DTLA that were set on fire. Or the man who died of smoke inhalation in a Minneapolis shop because he couldn't escape the flames.
At least 19 people died last summer. Don't downplay it.
You can state this opinion as fact but I think it is important to acknowledge that many people experienced the events of last summer in a way that makes it quite comparable to them.
This is a pretty weasely argument from Glenn. Many of the people who invaded the Capitol weren’t arrested, period.
Sympathy for white supremacy within law enforcement is its own thorny issue, but we certainly shouldn’t let it deter us from taking action against places we know domestic terrorists plan their attacks.
> Do you know how many of the people arrested in connection with the Capitol invasion were active users of Parler? Zero
Conspiracy theories aside Parler wasn’t removed in relation to involvement with the capital invasion. They got booted off for poor moderation - repeatedly not being willing to do anything about illegal/hate content and the increase in number of complaints.
I don’t think Amazon or Apple (and to a lesser extent Google) can be viewed as competitors to Parler in any material way.
Verify away. But facts are nothing more than isolated points. In my reading of Greenwald, he (usually) selects the facts that push his narrative. So verifying his facts is meaningless in the context of establishing the veracity of his broader claims. You need more facts than what he presents to see the full picture. And then his narrative usually falls appart.
> If the allegations about hunters laptop were transparently fraudulent, why do the gmail originated messages pass DKIM validation?
The refusal to release the full messages with complete headers was a point of contention in the original reporting of this story. If enough information was released, to let the public inspect the messages and verify the DKIM signatures themselves, this is a new development that goes beyond what was originally reported and alleged.
Have the full messages been released to the public so this can be verified?
That appears to be one single email with limited context. The README.md in that repo outright states that the context for the email is absent and does not necessarily provide concrete proof of any specific narrative:
> ... Remember that while the email is validated, the context isn't. It's possible this reflects a secret meeting to conspire with Vice President Biden. Or, it's possible the guy attended one of the many Washington D.C. social functions whereby people shake hands with politicians and exchange pleasantries. As Richelieu is claimed to have said "Give me six words by the most honest of men and I'll find something to hang him by". Give me an email dump from the most honest of persons, and I'll pull one out of context to hang them in the court of social media. ...
> ... I personally have many doubts about where this email came from, and the overall "narrative" they are trying to push. Regardless, I can validate the basic facts about this email.
1). AWS can suspend service for any customer immediately upon giving that customer notice. They do not have to provide a "remediation period" or give the customer any grace time at all. Every customer agrees to this as part of the AWS Customer Agreement
2). AWS can terminate an account immediately if they deem you in violation of their policies instead of a suspension - as was the case with Parler. It's all in the AWS customer agreement, which Parler agreed to.
Companies can follow their terms of service, but under some circumstances they must act in good faith. If Parler can show that Amazon deliberately applied its terms of service in an arbitrary or discriminatory manner, then arguably it could build a case for tortious interference in the business relationship between Parler and its advertisers.
This seems to be the only possible argument, that Parler is being unfairly singled out and that other platforms have hosted similarly violent content without repercussion.
The free speech / censorship argument doesn't seem to fly.
The Lin Wood post on Parler (https://twitter.com/slpng_giants/status/1347190280492089344) and dozens of other posts with screenshots on that thread are clearly targeted threats of political violence and have never constituted free speech:
> common limitations or boundaries to freedom of speech relate to libel, slander, obscenity, pornography, sedition, incitement, fighting words, classified information, copyright violation, trade secrets, food labeling, non-disclosure agreements, the right to privacy, dignity, the right to be forgotten, public security, and perjury
If that is so, why would any company that has a critical business utilize these cloud services? For example, a 911 emergency software provider, a law enforcement agency, a hospital or other medical organization, political organizations, religious organization, or any other organization that either has critical services to deploy or may get caught in the crosshairs of a political movement.
I think given these events companies should reassess the risk of using these cloud services and the potential for disruption of their businesses going forward.
> companies should reassess the risk of using these cloud services
Absolutely! If the horror stories of companies losing access to their accounts due to automated processes going haywire haven't convinced us that "cloud risk" is real, perhaps this incident with Parler will focus our minds to this possibility.
The claim is that AWS and Twitter are strategic partners, and Twitter is a direct competitor of Parler -
> 4. AWS’s decision to effectively terminate Parler’s account is apparently
motivated by political animus. It is also apparently designed to reduce competition
in the microblogging services market to the benefit of Twitter. 5. Thus, AWS is violating Section 1 of the Sherman Antitrust Act in
combination with Defendant Twitter
> 15. Less than a month ago, AWS announced with a press release a new
multi-year deal with Twitter. AWS will “provide global cloud infrastructure to
deliver Twitter timelines.” Twitter Selects AWS as Strategic Provider to Serve
Timelines, Press Center, Amazon, (Dec. 15, 2020),
https://press.aboutamazon.com/news-releases/news-release-det....
Antitrust laws are broader than that. A company can be guilty of anti-competitive behavior even if that company is not a direct competitor of the parties affected.
The whole claim by Parlor (read the linked complaint) is that AWS is doing this in coordination with Twitter to stop the flood of conservative people (including Trump himself, allegedly) moving from Twitter to Parlor after Twitter banned Trump (this is substantiated with links from media claiming that could happen and by the fact Parlor had become the most downloaded app on the AppStore after Twitter announced the Trump ban)... they claim AWS and Twitter are basically trying to kill Twitter's competition.
Why AWS would help Twitter is unclear to me, though.
You didn't hurt my feelings. It just surprises me that someone thinks "Wow! I have a strongly held opinion about X which I really must share with the world!" but then doesn't even bother to take the minuscule amount of care required to note how X is spelled.
It just suggests the poster's examination of the subject in question has been pretty perfunctory and their opinion slightly less than well thought out.
[But congratulations on not being a Yank. That's something, at least]
That is not the only thing "AntiCompetitve" means, Favoring One customer over all other customers can also be Anti-Competitive under US Law, Parler does not have to compete with Amazon for them to be acting in an Anti-Competitive manner
Parler have actually said they don't use any of the proprietary AWS Services because of the danger of lock in - so I think they could. They just have to move 50TB+ of data to a new provider, which is not something that can be done quickly.
Seems bizarre to be running a controversial service and not have any disaster recovery planning in place. Did they really think that these companies wouldn't eventually get tired of the controversy and kick them?
Even not using the proprietary AWS services, migrating from one to another cloud hosting provider - and which one will take their business now? - isn't easy. Not only for the size of the data store (50-70 TB?) but many development, testing, deployment and operating processes need to be retrofitted to a new infrastructure provider. I guess they didn't pro-actively plan for this.
They can consider themselves very lucky and capable if it can be done within a week, but I think it'll take longer.
If another provider will host them. Also, with a big enough service even if you are doing everything right in terms of cloud interoperability, just moving everything from one cloud to another can be a massive logistical challenge.
No, not according to the lawsuit: "Parler has tried to find alternative companies to host it and they have fallen through. It has no other options. Without AWS, Parler is finished as it has no way to get online."
There are thousands of hosting companies out there. They either haven't tried very hard or people really don't want to deal with them. Neither of those things seem to be AWS' problem.
In the link posted by OP, they say the code needs to be re-written for another cloud provider, and that it cannot be done fast enough to capture the alleged flood of conservatives, Trump included, trying to move From Twitter to Parler (which would probably die out within a few days if Parler did not come back up).
They also claim no other cloud provider has accepted their business because AWS, by leaking its email to Parler to Buzzfeed (which showed lots of violence threats on Parler) before even sending it to Parler, had tarnished its reputation (i.e. it was trying to manipulate popular opinion by leaking the worst posts they found - and Parler claims the same content could be easily found on Twitter at the same time - I don't know as I don't see this shit in my stream but everyone has very different streams based on their preferences, so it's plausible I think).
This looks like a dirty game they're playing, and to be honest, it's hard to say for sure that AWS and Twitter are completely clean in this... AWS is probably betting Parler will get enough hate so that other customers who may have controversial businesses running on AWS will not consider moving elsewhere (or al least preparing to do so at short notice)... which to me, kind of shows that Parler may have a point in this argument... On the other hand, Parler had very disturbing content (I did manage to have a peek just before they went offline) which I think goes well beyond the acceptable level, but for AWS to "kill" them, as they claim AWS is trying to do, seems quite heavy handed.
> We may terminate this Agreement for any reason by providing you at least 30 days’ advance notice.
and
> Either party may terminate this Agreement for cause if the other party is in material breach of this Agreement and the material breach remains uncured for a period of 30 days from receipt of notice by the other party.
The latter obviosuly applies here. Am I missing something?
> 6.1 Generally. We may suspend your or any End User’s right to access or use any portion or all of the Service Offerings immediately upon notice to you if we determine:
> (a) your or an End User’s use of the Service Offerings (i) poses a security risk to the Service Offerings or any third party, (ii) could adversely impact our systems, the Service Offerings or the systems or Content of any other AWS customer, (iii) could subject us, our affiliates, or any third party to liability, or (iv) could be fraudulent;
3) The claim for contract violation is invalid because the contract says it has to be arbitrated instead:
> Disputes will be resolved by binding arbitration, rather than in court, except that you may assert claims in small claims court if your claims qualify. The Federal Arbitration Act and federal arbitration law apply to this Agreement.
Yeah, I think the contract claims are the most transparently weak (I think all the claims are weak and that the lawsuit is more perfomative gesture for PR grievance than filed with substantial expectation of recovery, but its not laughable on the level of most of the Trump election lawsuits.)
> but its not laughable on the level of most of the Trump election lawsuits.
I don't know, they do have some of the greatest hits from those lawsuits:
* Let's ask the court to prevent things that have already happened (it wants to restrain AWS from cutting off service to Parler, but it filed the suit after that happened).
* File exhibits that are atrociously unusable (the PDF of the service agreement clearly cuts out several lines of text, although I think this was unintentional).
* Provide a single paragraph of argument to address the single claim that actually gives your claim federal jurisdiction at all.
* Clearly incapable of reading contract plain text (in this case). The contract claims are likely to fail since AWS has a right to terminate it unilaterally (which they don't address in their filing all), but it's moot anyways because binding arbitration clause means the court has no right to hear it.
* Evidence for their claim boils down to "there's no other possible reason anyone would want to shut us down than CONSPIRACY!"
* Urgency is requested, but there's no motions to actually grant urgent relief (e.g., an emergency filing or motion for expedited relief).
* Plaintiff fails to spell its own name correctly in a few cases (admittedly, only one here).
Everyone keeps bringing up Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission these last few days, but it seems very few people actually know what was decided in the case. The Supreme Court didn’t want to get its hands dirty with this issue so it was a very narrow reversal. Specifically, they said that the Civil Rights Commission was not neutral in it’s consideration, comparing the treatment of the baker (where the commissioner said that invoking freedom of religion is “one of the most despicable pieces of rhetoric that people can use”) to other cases where non-discrimination exceptions were granted when bakers refused to make cakes with anti-same sex marriage messaging. The question is still legally open.
I personally think it’s ridiculous to argue that the baker’s right to free expression is involved in this. But then again we have people boycott service providers for their choices of customers all the time.
There is all kinds of Untested legal claims about these click wrapped ToS "contracts" we all "sign" with out reading by clicking a check box on a sign up form.
I don't know if people trying to argue that twitter is just as bad as Parler are doing it out of ignorance of the issues or just bad faith.
Parler isn't being dropped by private companies because a user said something mean on their service. They're being dropped by AWS, Apple, Google etc because they allow, even encourages its users to conspire to commit violence and assassinate public officials.
The main reasons its users went to Parler in the first place is because they weren't allowed to do that on twitter and reddit.
I feel like the AWS lawyer is going to make the following claims:
1- This action (dropping Parler) is within the actions established in our ToS.
2- Parler's very goal is to attract these sort of demographics and similar actions have been taken in the past (Stormfront comes to mind)
The only chance this has is if Parler has language in their contract requiring that 30-day notice of service termination. My guess is that they don't. They also spend a LOT of time in this filing pointing out that AWS is a very big share of the market (the court won't care) and that they host Twitter (the court will again, not care) in an effort to say that AWS was worried the shift to Parler from Twitter would financially hurt Twitter and then AWS (which doesn't make sense, since AWS is hosting both so 6 million people shifting just means one check gets smaller and the other larger).
This is the quality of legal filings I've begun to expect surrounding these issues. "They're bad, and it's pretty obvious to everyone, duh!" doesn't actually hold up in court though...
To be fair, that does look more like a mistake--the HTML-to-PDF conversion appears to truncate a decent amount of text per page.
Ooh, just noticed, the contract also has this gem:
> Disputes will be resolved by binding arbitration, rather than in court, except that you may assert claims in small claims court if your claims qualify.
Which tosses out any claims of contract violation because you agreed to arbitrate it first!
As I just said to my wife, you'd have a better shot with a lawsuit against the sky because you got a sunburn than you would trying to sue AWS for booting you from their servers. At least the sun never got you to agree to a draconian ToS.
I also liked their idea that AWS is trying to protect their contract with Twitter because users are leaving Twitter(hosted by AWS) for Parler (which was hosted by AWS at the time). If I have a glass of beer in my left hand and switch to my right, have I lost my glass of beer? How would that possibly benefit AWS unless somehow Parler negotiated better terms than Twitter? If anything, the opposite seems likely.
>I don't know if people trying to argue that twitter is just as bad as Parler are doing it out of ignorance of the issues or just bad faith.
The thing is, Trump never ever called for riots. You have to read between the lines and ignore his history of being anti-riots and go for a bad faith interreption to even consider him having called for what happened.
Flipside,
How many celebrities were calling for the death of the maga hat kit? They got away with it.
Iranian's Khamanei has outright called for jews to be exterminated. Various other middle eastern leaders have called for gays to be killed. They are outright double standards.
Regardless, it was very clear Trump was to be banned. At the end of the day it's very interesting how all these tech companies came together to ban not trump but vast array of their supporters. So far the known count for Twitter is >200,000 trump supporters.
At all 200,000 inciting violence? Does the USA really have that many people looking to overthrow the government?
>They're being dropped by AWS, Apple, Google etc because they allow, even encourages its users to conspire to commit violence and assassinate public officials.
So the entire platform is to be removed because of some content. More specifically, if someone wants to destroy a platform, they need only have bots spam comments and therefore the platform goes offline?
>The main reasons its users went to Parler in the first place is because they weren't allowed to do that on twitter and reddit.
No, that's not accurate at all. there were millions of users on parler. Many of which weren't even american nor care what was going on.
This is at best a rationalization for shutting down the platform.
> They're being dropped by AWS, Apple, Google etc because they allow, even encourages its users to conspire to commit violence and assassinate public officials.
How is Parler "encouraging its users to conspire to commit violence"?
"Friday night one of the top trending tweets on Twitter was 'Hang Mike Pence.' But AWS has no plans nor has it made any threats to suspend Twitter’s account."
> "We blocked the phrase and other variations of it from trending," a Twitter spokesperson said. "We want trends to promote healthy discussions on Twitter. This means that at times, we may prevent certain content from trending. As per our Help Center, there are rules for trends — if we identify accounts that violate these rules, we’ll take enforcement action."
Also false equivocation. Twitter failed/refused to moderate content for years throughout their meteoric growth, and only now are they barely getting a handle on it - and even then they seem to apply the rules in an uneven fashion.
Expecting any potential competitor to instantly achieve perfect moderation seems like a perfect way to entrench FB, Twitter and others as the de-facto public square.
Parler is not simply failing to "instantly achieve perfect moderation," and, I personally believe it is disingenuous to speculate the fact. The service's core principals include strict limits to moderation.
> AWS knew its allegations contained in the letter it leaked to the press that Parler was not able to find and remove content that encouraged violence was false—because over the last few days Parler had removed everything AWS had brought to its attention and more. Yet AWS sought to defame Parler nonetheless. And because of AWS false claims, leaked to the public, Parler has not only lost current and future customers, but Parler has also been unable to find an alternative web hosting company. In short, AWS false claims have made Parler a pariah.
My take will depend on the timeline: If Amazon indeed asked Parler to remove the content weeks ago (as stated in the letter), but Parler only did so "over the last few days" (ie after the shit had hit the fan?), then, I'd argue Amazon does have a point...
I don't know, but again: does that matter? Is Amazon obliged to keep their communications with Parler private? Certainly Amazon's customers don't adhere to that norm.
The controversy here seems very simple. When Amazon alerted Parler to specific violent posts, did Parler immediately remove them, or did it wait to remove them until shit blew up? I don't know that I need to care whether or when Amazon alerted BuzzFeed. Amazon says it's removing Parler because of Parler's behavior, not because of something Buzzfeed reported.
According to NYT, many of the tweets were discussing the fact that demonstrators were shouting the phrase. The tweets themselves allegedly were not directly inciting violence.
> Mr. Matze pointed to the fact that Twitter had recently promoted the phrase “Hang Mike Pence” as a trending topic. (The majority of the discussion on Twitter was about rioters chanting the phrase about the vice president on Wednesday.) “I have seen no evidence Apple is going after them,” Mr. Matze said. “This would appear to be an unfair double standard as every other social media site has the same issues, arguably on a worse scale.”
Further illustration of why Twitter's trending algorithm is so ridiculous. Half the time, when a phrase is trending, most of the tweets returned are along the lines of "Why is 'foo' trending?"
By the other comments, it seems was true but Twtiter moderated it quickly.
However, I remember when J.K. Rowling gave her opinion on transgender issues, RIP JK Rowling was trendin gtopic for hours, and she received a lot of hate and threats on Twitter. Not only that, a lot of people started replying to her tweets with dick pics, which was dangeours because she was in the middle of an activity with children (they could see those replies).
So yeah, definitely Twitter chooses what to moderate and what not.
Firstly, it was but (apart from being discussion of the phrase rather than actually planning to kill him) it was swiftly taken down .
Secondly, at risk of stating the obvious: Parler has self-selected its audience to consist of proportionally many more extremists, they still exist on twitter but not even close to as prevalently on Parler (not least because many extremists on Twitter are going to be on the left, where the dialogue is harder to police because it's much less obvious where the violence starts)
If you google it, it depends on the bias of the sources. One side is saying twitter let it trend. But twitter also removed the hashtag once it started trending. Unsurprisingly, this goes unmentioned on sources claiming it was "allowed" to trend.
This just isn't true. We can argue whether or not Parler was not moderating correctly - but to imply they did not have a policy against violence is not true:
6. Threats of Violence, Advocacy of Imminent Lawless Action, Threats to Dox, Bribery or Criminal Solicitation
So-called “fighting words” are not a violation of our Guidelines.2
6.1 However, reported parleys, comments, or messages sent using our service will be deemed a violation of these Guidelines if they contain:
6.1.1 a “serious expression of an intent to commit an act of unlawful violence to aparticular individual or group of individuals,” with either the intent or reckless disregard as to whether the communication will “place the victim in fear of bodily harm or death.”
6.1.2 an explicit or implicit encouragement to use violence, or to commit a lawless action,such that: (a) the Parleyer intends his or her speech to result in the use of violence orlawless action, and (b) the imminent use of violence or lawless action is the likelyresult of the parley, comment, or message
6.1.3 a threat to dox anyone for any reason.
6.1.4 an offer to give or receive money, or other goods or services, in exchange for (a) afavor from any public official, or (b) the commission of any illegal action by anyone
Since the previous comment where you said this is dead, I'll repeat my response here: Amazon presented Parler with a list of violent posts that they had reported to Parler and that Parler had refused to remove. The whole letter Amazon sent to Parler was reported out by Buzzfeed, including screenshots of the violent posts that Parler did not remove.
I don't know whether that's true or false but I also don't know why it matters. Absent a confidentiality clause AWS is free to publish whatever they want. Certainly, people routinely publish their private communications with AWS.
I may be misreading things, but it sounds to me like they published the list of things to remove and Parler removed them after notification, but they're using the publication to try to make it look like they were notified before they actually were.
But this is a complaint, so I can't just assume that any of these things are actually true and that's why I want to reserve judgement until we hear how all the evidence plays out in court.
I think we agree: the material timing information here "when did AWS alert Parler to violent material" and "when did Parler remove that violent material".
The policy means nothing if it isn't applied and a lot of what happened on Wednesday (and way worse) was planned in the open on Parler. Parler's moderation also principally consisted from what I've heard of community 'jury of peers' where a reported post was shown to ~5 other users who decided if it was a violation which is incredibly insufficient and basically guarantees the policy will not be enforced.
There's been reporting that Amazon sent them some specific... Parlers (?) (IDK what the Tweet equivalent is over there) they said violated their contract or something and they weren't taken down. It's not about the speed either it's that their moderation system was completely half-assed. Keep in mind the kind of talk and planning that lead to Wednesday has been happening over there since the election and similar "hang the traitors" talk has been going on much longer basically since the site started.
It let all of these active discussions and organisation proceed knowingly. The policy does not exist.
Edit: I love how I’m being downvoted when quite frankly there are enough screenshots out there and on /r/ParlerWatch of their shit show of moderation. You’re deluded if you think there’s a moderation policy other than ignorance by design.
Tweets from Ayatollah Khomeini talking about how Israel is a cancer[1] that needs to be violently eradicated[2] apparently don't run afoul of the "Glorification of Violence" policy. OTOH Trump's 2 tweets, which were tame in comparison, were bannable.
Banning Ayatollah Khomeini from Twitter would probably cause an international incident. He might declare a fatwa[0] against Twitter, the US, or both. If none of these events happen, there's still a risk of Islamic terrorists attacking Twitter's offices. I'd probably leave his account in place too.
What is hypocritical about AWS's decision to terminate Parler?
AWS doesn't make any claims to providing universal service and like most (if not all) service providers they can terminate service for a variety of reasons.
I have no inside information but it was probably a combination of some of the following factors.
1. Compliance with the AWS acceptable usage policy. AWS says that Parler didn't comply with the AUP. All the facts won't come out unless this lawsuit goes to trial and that seems unlikely. Parler's CEO doesn't seem to think moderation is important so it's easy to believe that they didn't put a lot of effort in it. It's also possible that they can't afford to comply with the AUP but that isn't Amazon's problem.
2. Cancel culture. It was only a matter of time before AWS started getting bad PR for having Parler as a client. Petitions for dropping them were already circulating internally and externally. It's easy to say that you shouldn't drop clients in response to pressure but there is a point at which doing so is a rational decision.
3. Liability. Parler was allegedly used for planning illegal activities. If another significant attack occurs then a class-action lawsuit will pursue both Parler and AWS for contributing to the attack - this happened with the September 11th attack. The costs of defending or settling this lawsuit could easily run into the millions.
If the complaint in the lawsuit is that the policy on websites with unmoderated violent content isn't applied equally, is it really "whataboutism" to point out that the policy isn't applied equally?
Hypothetically, how would you be able to prove that point without providing examples?
Parler has a moderation policy and they don’t apply it. Content that promotes illegal activity is not protected free speech and is also prohibited by Parler’s policies. They selectively applied that moderation after they became popular with MAGA.
The German government maintains a blacklist of websites not suitable for minors. We can use this blacklist when setting up web access for children to block at least the worst websites (mainly porn). The last time I checked, 4Chan was not on that list.
4chan lacks any kind of organization whatsoever. It's hard to say that 4chan is any particular thing because it's so amorphous and liable to switch to something else new. That makes it hard for most people to see them as potentially dangerous.
Their posting style also helps. They talk about absurd things, in absurd ways. They look insane, they don't even try to make things reasonable. That makes many people underestimate them, because they seem far too loony to do anything significant. It also makes deplatforming them unappealing. Where are these people going to go if 4chan stops existing? No one wants to see this on their Facebook feed.
In short, 4chan acts like they're too incompetent to do anything.
Parler is full of people who are coherent enough to actually stage some kind of a violent, semi-coordinated attack.
4chan is regularly censored and banned (not sure about hosting specifically, I only browse maybe once a month), and threads aren't available forever. It's a different kettle of fish to running a social network - you'd struggle to organise much of anything like this on 4chan.
Yet 4chan has succeeded in may organized tasks. They played capture the flag with Shia LaBeouf [1], fixed votes for NYTs person of the year [2], and made the OK hand signal into a White Power symbol [3]. Sure these aren't super involved, but it's a bit dismissive to say they aren't capable of organized efforts.
The difference between the Capitol thing and the stuff 4chan gets up to is that the protests like this require a critical mass of not only people but belief - the former is possible on 4chan, but the latter needs some kind of consistent identity to rally around.
1. 4chan has active and responsive moderation for all content. Illegal content is removed quickly.
2. 4chan is extremely simple - there is a max of content, content is anonymous, and old content decays and is removed. There are no notifications, replies, searches, etc.
Isnt 4chan self hosted? i remember reading blog posts about m00t's server migrations which was actually him strapping a server in the back seat of his car and driving cross country. but that was a while ago, maybe before cloud hosting became the norm.
The difference is that Parler was a disruptive platform, 4chan isn't.
There is a bunch of awful content hosted on AWS, but it's generally only when you reach some scale and become a threat to those in silicon valley that you can expect to be shut off.
Because AWS decided it was. It's really that basic. I think gay people should be able to get wedding cakes from literally any baker as a protected class, but the law disagrees with me. The end, unless new laws are passed.
Parler is not a protected class, their users posts are not protected speech. The only leg they will have to stand on is the terms of their AWS contract, which AWS will likely have had lawyers craft with steel vault level protections to shield the company from liability in cases like this. It would be shocking if Parler wins this injunction (and based on time sensitivity, we'll probably find out later today) but even if they do long term they're going to have to build/buy new server structure.
It was in the sense that it was a new platform that had high profile people like Ted Cruz on it with millions of followers more than he had on Twitter.
No one cares about 4chan because it has no real political influence. Parler was perhaps the first alternative platform in a long time to have actual political influence.
This complaint alleges that AWS is shutting down Parler for the benefit of Twitter. That seems like a stretch, does AWS really have an interest in Twitter succeeding above any other social network, especially when both run on AWS?
This complaint seems to include a ton of things like:
- AWS was especially mean to us
- AWS is hypocritical, look how bad twitter is
- We were singled out for political reasons
- This will kill us
All of which might be true, but none of which is illegal. The main (only?) real legal complaint here seems to amount to "AWS banned us to prop up Twitter in an anticompetitive way that's illegal under antitrust laws." That seems incredibly weak to anyone who's been following this story at all.
The charitable interpretation of AWS's actions would be that they banned Parler for refusing to moderate effectively. The less charitable version is that AWS doesn't care about Parler, but caved to public and internal pressure to ban them. In no reasonable interpretation did AWS do it because they just love Twitter so much. I don't see this suit going anywhere.
The supposed breach of contract seems bigger to me.
> AWS is also breaching it contract with Parler, which requires AWS to provide Parler with a thirty-day notice before terminating service, rather than the less than thirty-hour notice AWS actually provided.
Don't think that flies. They quote a generic section on Termination for Convenience but completely leave out the relevant section on Suspension + Termination for Cause:
From section 6.1 on Suspension:
We may suspend your or any End User’s right to access or use any portion or all of the Service Offerings immediately upon notice to you if we determine ... (a) your or an End User’s use of the Service Offerings (i) poses a security risk to the Service Offerings or any third party
Then they go on to complain about how AWS has completely terminated them, but that section also doesn't appear favorable.
From section 7.2 on Termination:
We may also terminate this Agreement immediately upon notice to you (A) for cause if we have the right to suspend under Section 6
Parler has copious amounts of this violent content going back for months, so it seems like this is a sure case of a "willful and continuing failure" to apply the required moderation in the agreement. IMO this shows an ongoing breach of contract so the "for Cause" clauses would apply.
The Anti-Trust argument seems like the strongest here but that's pretty notoriously difficult to succeed with. I guess not too far from the App Store cases going on right now.
TLDR: Content promoting violence - clearly more than mere threats given the actions of several users on Jan. 6 - is against the AWS agreement and services can be terminated immediately upon notice.
I haven't looked at standard AWS contract language but they ban people all the time for TOS violations, and I will be pretty shocked if their contracts don't have an allowance for sudden cut-offs, because that's something they routinely need to be able to do.
Unless they have a different agreement from the standard User Agreement, AWS Custom Agreement[0] 7.2(b)(ii) states that:
(ii) By Us. We may also terminate this Agreement
immediately upon notice to you (A) for cause if we have
the right to suspend under Section 6, (B) if our
relationship with a third-party partner who provides
software or other technology we use to provide the Service
Offerings expires, terminates or requires us to change the
way we provide the software or other technology as part of
the Services, or (C) in order to comply with the law or
requests of governmental entities.
Upon examining 6 of that document:
(a) your or an End User’s use of the Service Offerings
(i) poses a security risk to the Service Offerings or any
third party, (ii) could adversely impact our systems, the
Service Offerings or the systems or Content of any other
AWS customer, (iii) could subject us, our affiliates, or
any third party to liability, or (iv) could be fraudulent;
Count Two goes into more detail. They claim that AWS is calling this a service suspension as they're retaining the data and are helping to facilitate the transfer out of AWS. Parler disputes this and calls it a termination of the contract.
This will likely be be the source of the debate. It's not directly said, but I would assume AWS is suspending service until it ultimately terminates the account. So it'll be contested if the time that it's suspended, but services still somewhat being rendered, constitutes a termination.
Thus, AWS is violating Section 1 of the Sherman Antitrust Act in combination with Defendant Twitter. AWS is also breaching it contract with Parler, which requires AWS to provide Parler with a thirty-day notice before terminating service, rather than the less than thirty-hour notice AWS actually provided. Finally, AWS is committing intentional interference with prospective economic advantage given the millions of users expected to sign up in the near future.
> "Doing so is the equivalent of pulling the plug on a hospital patient onlife support. It will kill Parler’s business—at the very time it is set to skyrocket."
I don't know if they can hold that true that people will be signing up per "skyrocket" metaphor. They can use past data, but cannot use unknown future data.
>I don't know if they can hold that true that people will be signing up per "skyrocket" metaphor. They can use past data, but cannot use unknown future data.
They can show that it was the #1 most downloaded app on Apple's app store and make a reasonable inference from that.
Possibly a precentage. Downloading the app is not always 1-to-1 for signing up. Someone could be using the web-version, then decides to download the app.
>AWS’s decision to effectively terminate Parler’s account is apparently
motivated by political animus. It is also apparently designed to reduce competition
in the microblogging services market to the benefit of Twitter.
>5. Thus, AWS is violating Section 1 of the Sherman Antitrust Act in
combination with Defendant Twitter. AWS is also breaching it contract with
Parler, which requires AWS to provide Parler with a thirty-day notice before
terminating service, rather than the less than thirty-hour notice AWS actually
provided. Finally, AWS is committing intentional interference with prospective
economic advantage given the millions of users expected to sign up in the near
future.
Remember, these are unchallenged claims from Parler.
I think the only interesting bit here is the 30h vs 30 day notice period. The cynic in me is interested to see the contract: if there was a 30 day notice in it, I imagine Parler could have gotten an emergency injunction to stay online. Unless there isn't or parler preferred to be "taken" off line for PR reasons?
Sorry if that view is a bit conspiracy-theory-esque...
This feels like a shoddy contract dispute just thrown in. I think it's a pretty immediately dead end and they probably know this. The contract is available to all here: https://aws.amazon.com/agreement/
IANAL, but from what I understand, contract law is below criminal law priority-wise.
If you knowingly were to provide meeting rooms for people plotting a coup or violence, I think you'd still be on the hook for something much greater than breach of contract, which is a civil claim.
> (a) Termination for Convenience. You may terminate this Agreement for any reason by providing us notice and closing your account for all Services for which we provide an account closing mechanism. We may terminate this Agreement for any reason by providing you at least 30 days’ advance notice.
> (b) Termination for Cause.
> (i) By Either Party. Either party may terminate this Agreement for cause if the other party is in material breach of this Agreement and the material breach remains uncured for a period of 30 days from receipt of notice by the other party. No later than the Termination Date, you will close your account.
> (ii) By Us. We may also terminate this Agreement immediately upon notice to you (A) for cause if we have the right to suspend under Section 6, (B) if our relationship with a third-party partner who provides software or other technology we use to provide the Service Offerings expires, terminates or requires us to change the way we provide the software or other technology as part of the Services, or (C) in order to comply with the law or requests of governmental entities.
(ii) (A) does not include the "breach of contract remains uncured for 30 days" stipulation; when Amazon has the right to suspend under Section 6 they may also terminate the agreement immediately.
Their "right to suspend under Section 6" includes:
> (a) your or an End User’s use of the Service Offerings (i) poses a security risk to the Service Offerings or any third party, (ii) could adversely impact our systems, the Service Offerings or the systems or Content of any other AWS customer, (iii) could subject us, our affiliates, or any third party to liability, or (iv) could be fraudulent;
> (b) you are, or any End User is, in breach of this Agreement;
Under (a), I could certainly see Amazon make an argument that Parler's use of the service offings poses a security risk to third parties. Not an electronic one necessarily, but I would think "a bunch of people threatening to hang the vice president" would qualify.
And under (b), Parler's end users being in breach of the agreement, they have plenty of a case as well. See Section 4: Your Responsibilities in the link above (I'm not going to excerpt all of it), but it includes these lines:
> you are responsible for all activities that occur under your account, regardless of whether the activities are authorized by you or undertaken by you, your employees or a third party (including your contractors, agents or End Users)
> You will ensure that Your Content and your and End Users’ use of Your Content or the Service Offerings will not violate any of the Policies or any applicable law. You are solely responsible for the development, content, operation, maintenance, and use of Your Content.
> You will ensure that all End Users comply with your obligations under this Agreement and that the terms of your agreement with each End User are consistent with this Agreement. If you become aware of any violation of your obligations under this Agreement caused by an End User, you will immediately suspend access to Your Content and the Service Offerings by such End User.
Not a lawyer, but I don't think that's a clear-cut "Amazon violated the contract" win for Parler
If your claim is that "[AWS's decision] is also apparently designed to reduce competition in the microblogging services market to the benefit of Twitter." and therefore an antitrust violation, you probably shouldn't also mention that "Parler’s rival social media apps, such as conservative-oriented Gab or
conservative media Rumble, are also experiencing record growth right now"...
Who Amazon does business with is their own decision.
But terminating Parler with such short notice that they had no chance of moving to an alternative without major disruption of their business. Well. That is deliberate destruction.
Without knowing anything about US civil law, I would expect Parler to have a strong case.
The suit states that Amazon and Parler had a contract which stated that 30 day notice would be given before service termination, and if that's true then this does seem like a strong suit.
But the entire text seems really biased and borderline crazy (all that stuff about monopoly/antitrust - since when is AWS even close to a monopoly?) so I wouldn't be surprised if they elided that the contract also allowed for early terminaiton if certain terms were being violated.
IANAL, but I already see one massive issue with the lawsuit:
Count 1 is a claim against the Sherman Antitrust Act. By their own citation (see claim 31), they need to allege specific facts that would conclude (1) the existence of a conspiracy, (2) intention on the part of the co-conspirators to restrain trade, and (3) actual injury to competition.
There's no facts that allege (2). Actually, I suspect they also need to list Twitter as a defendant to properly claim (1) as well, since it's Twitter that has the alleged monopoly, and the one for whom the alleged conspiracy to restrain trade exists.
Their facts probably don't even amount to alleging (1). They basically say "AWS also provides services to Twitter" (okay that's not a conspiracy by itself) and "Twitter also had an issue with the #HangMikePence hashtag" (omitting the fact that Twitter did kill the hashtag)--which still doesn't allege a conspiracy.
It wasn't too long ago that we cheer-on and celebrate how Twitter hosted calls for political violence. Much was said about how Twitter enabled the Arab Spring, and how that was so wonderful. There's even a wikipedia page. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_and_the_Arab_Spri...
Now the Western elite (on both sides, mind you -- whether it's against BLM or the Proud Boys) are doing their best pikachu face.
Mob-style tyrannical democracy for thee, but not for me.
That's a good point, and also I've seen comments here praising the "Arab Spring" years after it killed many millions of people (in Syria, Libya, etc.).
Is anyone else getting exhausted by these discussions? This is an important topic and I have strong opinions about it and the events surrounding it but gosh, something about the tenor of the back-and-forth in here is just wearing me out.
I read TFA and came back to upvote the post. Given that this is HN I expected to find some good discussion in the comments - and there is a bit, increasing over time - but there's just so much propaganda / outright stupid stuff here in the comments.
This article seems like it should be on HN, but the stuff in the comments made me want to flag it (I didn't). Fortunately it seems the good discussion is coming out on top over time, and the worst comments do get down voted & flagged pretty quickly. But, as you said, there is a lot of repetitive back-and-forth here which has already been done over the past few days.
The irony is that a few years ago everyone thought the telco's were going to be the ones to control what you see/do on the internet. lol
Has this become an anti-trust issue (assuming there is a way to tie it to the Sherman Act) based on monopoly power? Google and Apple have 99.83% market share, owning both the platforms and distribution? Is it time to break these up?
This is quite clearly yet another lawsuit without merit just to grab headlines, and will be dropped or dismissed before it gets to trial. What's sad is that we are giving them the attention they want.
Who is David J. Groesbeck, P.S. didnt Parler’s CEO say they lost their lawyers? It seems this would have been filed a day or two before they lost their lawyers.
Focusing on the brief itself, I can see merits for injunctive relief (breach of contract). Bear in mind I am sure there are clauses that Amazon is going to cite against -- we only have access to this document. (It also appears hastily written a bit, which I can guess was the case.)
I would hold my breath for Sherman (Anti-trust) Act being applied. (Especially, as there is the whole people stormed Congress elephant in the room.) But in summary, the perception I get is that this is a strictly business to business lawsuit, contracts were signed etc.
I am curious if some Washington knowledgeable in the area lawyer can provide any insight and their point of view.
P.S. Of course this is just the point of view of one-side and we can not say anything concrete until this is litigated.
N.B. I am not a lawyer, not familiar and not licensed to practice in Washington.
It's amazing how arbitrarily lines are drawn in this thread. I'd be eager to see people that disapprove AWS's actions what they would say in the following situation:
1) Parler banning some of its own users for trolling.
2) Their own employer/company banning people that use it to distribute child porn.
3) A utility company disconnecting users that continuously disrupt its electrical grid.
Of course you'd be fine with 1, 2 because neither your company nor Parler are common carriers, as defined by law, and have no obligation to provide their service to anyone. Guess what - AWS is not a common carrier either. But even a common carrier such as the electric company can terminate users that purposefully violate its terms of service.
At the end of the day, we all know this. We know that private services have no First Amendment obligation. And yet, thread after thread, its all the same fake outrage that's masking a much simple emotion - "I hate it when my guys lose".
In seeing all of these complaints about the cloud providers getting too big, owning the internet etc, have folks forgotten how to run their own equipment or what renting a dedicated server is?
The internet did function prior to cloud computing existing and surprise, running a rack full of NUCs can give you a lot of capacity to run a glorified message board.
Let’s be clear, access to cloud computing companies like AWS is a competitive advantage because it requires less upfront capital and less engineering time to manage. I can 100% see why Parler would prefer having access to AWS compared to running their own hardware.
Ianal, so I can’t judge the merits of this legal case. To be honest I’m surprised Parler can find lawyers willing to bring it to court on their behalf, or banks willing to process transactions to pay said lawyers.
“I’m surprised Parler can find lawyers willing to bring it to court on their behalf, or banks willing to process transactions to pay said lawyers.”
Personally, I am surprised at the opposite. That a company cannot find lawyers to defend their position or process payments from their customers without due process is horrible.
The fact that you were not surprised by it is quite worrisome. I don’t mean that as a personal attack on you, but more as an observation of what has become acceptable or at least ordinary in a society.
I think you misunderstand me. I was surprised that the domino effect started with Parler, but that was several days ago. Now I’m surprised that the domino effect hasn’t reached everyone they do business with.
FBI is warning of armed protests at all state capitals between now and 20th.
I can't help but feel that by the time anything comes of this, the primary goal of AWS and a lot of other companies involved in the recent bans will have already been accomplished; smothering an escalation of the current situation until after the 20th.
It feels like we are witnessing a sort of immune response from these companies triggered to protect them from an existential threat to their business. Set off by Wednesdays events. Instability is bad for business.
I did some testing this morning when a friend shared a link to Parler content and the server did not resolve.
I don't know whether it is DNS censorship as well or just poorly configured TTL caching on some DNS servers, but if you have a link to video.parler.com and it doesn't resolve anymore, you can replace video.parler.com with the actual IP address of the server 8.240.251.252 8.240.147.124 8.240.248.252 they are still online though the DNS is beginning to fail globally.
> 6.1 Generally. We may suspend your or any End User’s right to access or use any portion or all of the Service Offerings immediately upon notice to you...
I'd bet they cite this as the reason:
> could subject us, our affiliates, or any third party to liability
How does stuff like this work in Germany, as I believe they have a lot of anti nazi laws against hate speech etc?
Like this should would have been shut down weeks in advance in Germany.
Have we learned nothing from history?
I can't believe people are fighting to give racists, mentally ill, brainwashed extremists a platform to organize and plot violent acts behind the disguise of free speech.
I have one question for you. At what point do you begin to question your ideology for it's intolerance, double standards, and moral inconsistencies? Have YOU learned nothing from history, ironically Hitler's rise to power, to even question the dogma being fed to you regarding racism and violence? I'm not saying you have to tolerate or even agree with your opposition. However, I'd challenge you to not partake in the past dictator's favorite action of belittling and scapegoating his political opposition. You are contributing to the very acts you espouse to be against by labeling all of your opposition as racists, mentally ill, brainwashed extremists. All you've demonstrated with your words is violence is okay, so long as you agree with the cause as we experienced COUNTLESS acts of violence in the US riots occurring throughout the year.
My man, the site (parler) is literally used by people who believe the lies that the election is stolen, who want to hang mike pence, who want to go to the capitol with guns and kill the elected representatives. It failed to moderate content that incites violence and was literally build to attract extremists who are on that platform to plot violent acts.
> The site (parler) is literally used by people who believe the lies that the election is stolen, who want to hang mike pence, who want to go to the capitol with guns and kill the elected representatives.
Have you ever used twitter? I've routinely encountered examples just as bad if not worse there.
Genuine question. Why don't platforms support both up and down voting?
I've always found it pretty obnoxious that you can only encourage content you want not discourage content you don't want. HN seems to have a good system.
Shouldn't platforms allow free speech but give the community the tools to discourage destructive speech?
> "Doing so is the equivalent of pulling the plug on a hospital patient on life support. It will kill Parler’s business — at the very time it is set to skyrocket."
While I get what they're trying to say, this is a really odd metaphor for them to use.
I am sure the fight will be watched closely. Both parties are well-heeled and motivated ( I am sure Mercers wouldn't want to lose their investment ). I know what I think and how I feel about it, but I do not want to derail this thread.
If you’re a business, do you really want to be on a provider that can pull your card with little to no notice? That’s a lot of power. The boot is coming down hard right now. The cloud is looking like a risky bet.
As a business we only do business with vendors that don’t host controversial sites due to risk from boycotts and negative press. I picked AWS because it was a safe choice because of actions like kicking off Parler.
This is a good point and I agree with it. The market will sort this out better than we could with regulation. I do think that some may see this is a reason to go back to their own data center. It's also a reason why some content creators moved off Patreon to their own subscription services. Although to rebut my own point, that doesn't seem to have affected Patreon much at all.
but customers like you are probably why AWS is taking the position they are. They don't want to risk other customers just to keep parler. That actually sounds like something a profit motivated company would do.... no conspiracies required.
edit: should probably note, customers/advertisers have boycotted companies before for having a whiff of scandal around them..
Sendgrid is a good example. We moved to mandrill because we don’t want any drama with our vendors. Sendgrid was ddosed over some drama with their evangelist and it affected our business. Last thing I want to do is having to explain to my exec team that our emails aren’t going out because of a vendor choice I made.
That may very well happen. But the equal and opposite response here would be to setup your own infrastructure.
We may very well see a "soft secession" as we have left providers and right providers and then we began to geographically locate ourselves around these providers.
> If you’re a business, do you really want to be on a provider that can pull your card with little to no notice?
Yes, I do, because otherwise I'm gonna be on a blacklisted IP range because every spammer in the world signed up for the "you've got 30 days to do whatever you like every time you create a new account with a stolen credit card" hosting provider.
It seems like there's at the very least a product-market fit for a cloud provider with less nebulous TOS. From the wording of the AWS contract, it sounds like the language is loose enough that any user can pretty much be terminated at whim.
If/when this lawsuit gets publicity, my guess is a lot of C-suite executives are gonna be looking over their shoulders and evaluating how screwed they'd be if their current cloud provider decided to deplatform them.
Amazon's probably counting on the fact that 99% of its customers' business doesn't have anything to do with politics, and therefore they'll write off the threat. But the counterpoint is that cancel culture has become so pervasive into people's personal lives that who knows what might happen.
If an executive shows up to a Trump-rally or posts a politically incorrect meme on his personal time, it's not outside the scope of possibility that AWS/GCP could demand that the company fire the person or else have their account terminated. The zeigeist is increasingly moving to the ideology that "silence is violence". Are companies, like Coinbase, that espouse political neutrality next?
Any company can now find itself on the wrong end of a cancel culture mob. If said mob has controls over your cloud providers TOS, then that's a major business risk.
> If/when this lawsuit gets publicity, my guess is a lot of C-suite executives are gonna be looking over their shoulders and evaluating how screwed they'd be if their current cloud provider decided to deplatform them.
Do you really think there are “a lot” of companies which host user content, refuse to moderate it, and refuse to deal with complaints forwarded by their service provider? Most C-level people are going to look at this and say “that's why we follow our contracts” or “I'm glad we don't have to worry about legal action against a rogue customer potentially impacting any infrastructure we share with them”.
The question is what constitutes "refusal to moderate". As far as I can tell, simply calling the election fraudulent is grounds for banning on all the major platforms.
To be clear, I don't believe that position, but at least 30 million Americans do. So now any company that hosts user content without the will or resources to censor the opinions held by one fifth of the electorate, can find its infrastructure turned off at the drop of hat. As a CEO, that would seem like unacceptable TOS to me.
> The question is what constitutes "refusal to moderate". As far as I can tell, simply calling the election fraudulent is grounds for banning on all the major platforms.
What makes you think that? They mark those as disputed but haven’t generally touched the ones which aren’t calling for violence. The court filing in question clearly shows that Amazon wanted them to deal with violence, not dishonesty, too.
and here we see the effects of this!!! as millions of people are still free to insult others and share their opinions of twitter's actions unhindered lol...
everyone can also cherry pick out instances where moderation has failed or things have fallen through the cracks. parler's entire MO has been to breed this kind of environment for growth.
removing one of the DIRECT causes to an attack on our foundational institutions is completely warranted IMO. save the slippery slope argument for something else, please.
Here's the proper context and venue to resolve the Parler/AWS dispute: a contract dispute in court.
Parler is blowing it in the third paragraph:
> Friday night one of the top trending tweets on Twitter was “Hang Mike Pence.” But AWS has no plans nor has it made any threats to suspend Twitter’s account.
The distinction, of course, is that the it was trending because the tweets were discussing the videos of violent Trump supporters chanting "Hang Mike Pence", and not calling for violence, as was widely occurring on Parler. That weak sauce isn't going to go far in court.
P4 is speculation on Amazon's motives. Parler would need some good evidence to show this claim is true.
P5 seems the strongest. If their contract really says 30-days notice (given the disingenuous p3, I wouldn't assume that), Amazon could be forced to replatform them for a while and have some damages.
It's pretty ironic that conservatives destroyed net neutrality when that would have been the final backstop to ensure that they were able to keep their servers connected to the internet. Frankly, I'll be happy to see the return of net neutrality even if it comes from a place of political dishonesty.
You reap what you sow. Conservatives are normally champions of corporate freedom, they never had a problem with the extreme bias on cable news or talk radio, but now that big tech companies have eclipsed the platforms they dominate they cry foul. AWS isn't an ISP, but if conservatives hadn't destroyed net neutrality they might have a legal leg to stand on when ISPs inevitably refuse to give them a business contract so that they might house their own servers. I think they deserve this outcome for being persistent bad faith actors in this regard, but I'd be happy to see a restoration of net neutrality now that conservatives are selfishly motivated to support it.
I hope this gets to discovery. There was clearly some coordination between Facebook and Twitter simultaneously taking down offical Trump accounts, Google and Apple simultaneously taking down the Parler app listing, and then Amazon removing them from AWS. Slack chatlogs exist, and if those are made public, the public backlash is going to be real.
It's all fun and games until you try to overthrow the government.
Parler's entire business model was centered around Trump holding onto power, by any means necessary. This isn't a "free speech" issue. Don't promote violence, and don't try to incite insurrection and you'll be fine.
Sure there were far-right people and calls for violence on Parler, but the same thing is on Twitter. Twitter and Facebook is literally overflowing with nazis, fascist, communists openly calling for violence against ppl or a particular class. And some accounts are left unchecked for very very long time. Calling for genocide of jews, killing of cops, racist comments against black people, asians etc. And suddenly Parler is the problem? I don't get this.
Twitter is full of pedos and rape videos and that's totally ok too? This is pathetic.
I have seen so many violent threats and incitements on Twitter, Snapchat, Facebook, and Instagram over the last 5 years that Parler could possibly make the case that they've been singled out, but I doubt it. They're just too unsympathetic of a plaintiff, imho.
That said, antitrust battles against Big Tech will dominate the next four years of economic policy, and rightfully so. GAFA is too big, too powerful, too manipulative, and needs to be brought to heel by every legal means necessary. The US government should also move to immediately outlaw targeted algorithmic advertising, which would make a huge impact on Big Tech's sectarian violence cashcow. (And yes, that's what this absolutely is. Sectarian violence is not just a term for non-Western countries.)
Twitter and Facebook have extensive systems for keeping the various horrors in check. They are not as good as I think they should be. But they're miles better than what Parler had, which was more of a fig leaf. (Full disclosure, I use to run an anti-abuse engineering team at Twitter. Now I'm at the ADL building the Online Hate Index.)
I will note that whatever antitrust beefs people have with Big Tech, Twitter isn't really in that league. Twitter's market cap is something like 4% of Google's and 6% of Facebook's. I think conflating the two issues here is unhelpful.
“Twitter and Facebook have extensive systems for keeping the various horrors in check. They are not as good as I think they should be. But they're miles better than what Parler had, which was more of a fig leaf.”
If Twitter and Facebook (being multibillion dollar companies with a decade or more to build these algorithms) haven’t solve this problem yet, how can any upstart possibly compete with them? They’d be shut down as soon as users started posting content on their fledgling services.
My NDAs constrain me from saying as much as much as I'd like, but it's a mistake to think that the key to fighting abuse is "algorithms". The heart of it is always human judgment. It starts at the executive level to set policy. That policy needs to be carefully socialized to users. The user need ways to report problems. And then you need trained staff to judge the reported content.
Algorithms can help, of course. But the problem is mainly a human one.
Humans are incredibly biased in making judgements like this. How do you “train” a person to enforce a standard that goes against their inherent biases?
Seems like the more objective the process can be shifted (by moving away from human decisions), the more effective/fair the process becomes.
Anyway, it sounds like you may work in this space, and, therefore, might have further insight, which I am very interested in hearing about.
It is definitely an Achilles Heel for social media platforms.
Unfortunately, there is no real objectivity here. Machine learning systems are fed large numbers of human judgments, are tuned based on human judgment, and then are deployed when other humans think them ready.
The way you get reasonable consistency, whether it's humans or machines, is by establishing clear standards, using them for training, and then continuously monitoring results. It's not perfect, of course. But nothing is.
Being smaller they can and should user human moderation. Twitter and Facebook have problems because of the huge number of posts. Parler is still small enough that then _can_ moderate.
Facebook is in a way better position financially to use human moderators than something like Parler is. Sure, Parler has orders of magnitude less volume. They also have orders of magnitude less money. Facebook can afford to hire 1,000 human moderators for every 1 human moderator Parler hires.
This whole "Parler can be better than Facebook because they are smaller" argument is just as illogical as it sounds.
Parler didn't even try to remove a very narrow, specific set of posts referred by AWS. I think if they did that, AWS probably had much harder time to justify booting Parler off from their platform.
Antitrust law is about constraining companies with excess market power, especially ones that use it in anticompetitive ways. That's a legitimate concern for companies like Google and Facebook, who dominate their markets. Twitter's popular, but as far as market power goes, it's far too small to dominate social networking.
I will admit that I dislike the projects you are working on since nebulous 'hate speech' has been undermining US foundations of free speech, but I appreciate the level headed argument.
It depends on what one thinks the foundations of free speech are. For a long time, hate speech has been used to suppress particular groups. In practice, if people with social power can scare disfavored groups into staying quiet, free speech is harmed. Harmed more, in my opinion, than by hate speech restrictions.
In practice, any platform has to choose between hosting abusers and hosting their targets. They will only get one or the other. Given that choice, I would rather boot the abusers. To me the goal of free speech in a democracy is about a maximally informed populace so we make optimal decisions. To the extent that any group wants to convey information, they can do it without abuse. But allowing abuse, especially that targeted at particular groups, limits speech more deeply.
I still really doubt anything will come of tech being broken up. Democrats, which are usually for anti-Monopoly & pro-regulation, now get so much money/favor from Big Tech it will be near impossible to sway them. While Republicans are generally against regulation to begin with. You bring the two together and there isn't much political will, imo.
These cases apply to what governments can do. AWS is a privately held subsidiary of a publicly traded company.
The 1st Amendment does not protect all free speech. It simply bans the US government from passing laws that limit free speech.
for AWS, it will come down to whether they’ve defined situations where they can end their agreement / contract (MSA/EULA) with Parler. Btw, that’s the argument Parler is making that they had an agreement with AWS and not they’re in breech. The feee speech comment is weaker than arguing a binding contract exists.
Of course, it sounds like they have the default MSA with AWS. So, likely has terms very much in AWS’s favor. Also, I’d say they probably have some type of clause related to activities that could hurt AWS’s brand equity as be grounds for early termination.
Bottom line: as the cases referenced show, the government cannot limit free speech with laws - 1st Amendment (read full text). Private/public companies can do whatever is in their contracts that customers agree with at sign up.
> The US government should also move to immediately outlaw targeted algorithmic advertising, which would make a huge impact on Big Tech's sectarian violence cashcow.
That is an interesting proposition, but I wonder what would fill the void created. I believe advertising does not increase consumption per-se, but that it redistributes it among a different set of product and services, so who would be the winners and losers of such an effort?
What's wrong with targeting ads based on subject matter?
TV channels and magazines know how this works. If the page is about fashion, sell ad space to clothing companies. If the page is about travel, sell it to hospitality companies and tourism boards. If the page is about politics or finance, sell it to people making catheters and stair lifts.
It's much less creepy than trying to spy on everybody who reads the page, and then looking for an ad that fits your warped understanding of their preferences.
My cofounder and I used to manage a £100k/year ad budget and we did TV, news papers, radio and Facebook. The level of engagement and ROI on Facebook was insane compared to the others specifically because we could tweak and cohort up the audience so specifically - we even commented how terrifyingly powerful it was and that it was a good job we were only selling a home efficiency central heating product because in “the wrong hands” it could clearly be devastating - you just don’t get that level of granularity with more mass media outlets, even when you break it down by readership/demographic
How much of that was useful engagement though? One of the hot topics a week ago was ad fraud being so prevalent on Facebook and Google that it caused Uber to shift their whole strategy
Ads based on the subject matter isn't the problem. "Targeted algorithmic advertising" in this context is building a profile of the viewer, and running ads based on that profile.
At its simplest, it's the ad network deciding that you were recently seen visting toyota.com, so it'll show you 4 ads over the next hour for Toyota vehicles, to help cement that association. At its worst, it builds up an individualized profile over the course of months from thousands of websites (with google ads everywhere, you bet!) and allow advertisers to practically target viewers based on a psych profile.
Uber was a victim of fraud, not a failure of advertising. They should've known better and used more checks to catch it quickly but they already run plenty of targeted campaigns precisely because they work well.
> I believe advertising does not increase consumption per-se, but that it redistributes it among a different set of product and services, so who would be the winners and losers of such an effort?
> antitrust battles against Big Tech will dominate the next four years of economic policy
Almost zero chance this happens, imo. Big tech spent _heavily_ on Democrats (98% of contributions [0]) and the Democrats have complete control for the next 4 years.
I’d argue not to use law to dismantle big tech companies even if I disagree with their banning.
Twitter, Facebook and Google’s social services (gmail and YouTube) are at their heights or just behind them. The cycle for when tech companies are devoured is coming to them. I’d wager something like PeerTube will take a big part of the void YT will leave behind, as the market for censorship-resistant video will grow along the growth of forbidden opinions. Centrally planned government interventions without fail do fail.
They aren’t past their peaks, they just demonstrated their power for all the incoming politicians. “Nice campaign you got here, be a shame if something happened to it.”
I won't. I'm just trying to determine what this has to do with showing the content. Authorities could have benefitted by seeing the stream, so this isn't a clearcut issue. Do you remember live 9/11 coverage? Were you telling people not to watch that?
It's the incitement that we should be concerned about, and balancing restrictions with peaceful freedom of expression.
I mean, I watched as people on Twitter and Facebook Live coordinated to torch one of my favorites neighborhoods in L.A. this summer. I saw looters tweet about breaking into a drug store in Sherman Oaks. You can't say it's just talk there. The damage to Melrose and DTLA had to have been in the tens of millions, if not more.
It looks like you've been using HN primarily for political battle. Can you please not do that? It's against the rules (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and it's the line across which we start banning accounts (https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...), regardless of which politics they're battling for. This is because it destroys what HN is supposed to exist for, which is curious conversation on a wide range of topics.
I will be very glad to stick to following the rules and limiting myself to technology discussions.
Could you please ban these topics then ? After all, this thread is a political discussion and imbalanced or biased statements naturally invite responses to correct them.
That's not an option—it's not that easy. I've explained why this is so many times, most recently here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25723581. If you check out that post and the ones it links to, you'll find thorough explanations. If you read some of those and still have a question that hasn't been answered there, I'd like to know what it is. Just please make sure that you've familiarized yourself with the material and understand the constraints we're subject to. If it's something simple like "just ban politics" or "just allow everything", I've already answered many times why that won't work.
The bottom line is that a certain amount of political discussion is inevitable here, and users (all of us, on all sides) need to learn the skills of doing that while remaining within the site rules: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. That's definitely doable, as many HN commenters demonstrate every day.
did you report them? was there any follow-up action? i'm not condoning it but it's unreasonable to expect them to be able to ban IN REAL TIME stuff like this if they aren't already observing specific people.
not to mention one of the instigators of this entire thing has been the president of the united states. his actions have consequences that are 100x order of magnitude than your rioter on the street.
Of course I reported them. Nothing happened. Twitter was totally supportive of everything that happened in June. They even put up billboards bragging about how their platform helped protests grow. During a pandemic.
Yeah, the idea that Parler was some free-speech bastion is nonsense. They were explicit and judicious with their use of the ban hammer to remove wrongthink from their platform - they just didn't consider the crazy and often extremely violent threats on their platform as wrongthink.
I've always liked this interpretation of MPAA ratings.
“If a man is pictured chopping off a woman’s breast, it only gets an R rating; but if, God forbid, a man is pictured kissing a woman’s breast, it gets an X rating. Why is violence more acceptable than tenderness?”
— Sally Struthers
I'm confused as to how some people here are simultaneously digging on Parler for speech they "allowed", and then also that "they weren't really free speech".
What is it you wanted them to do? I think it's pretty reasonable to not have "See me on Parler @ParlerLovesNaziPussy" as that content that Parler could not control outside of their platform.
Restricting usernames seems like a prudent move, even for a free speech platform.
People aren't digging on parlor for speech they allowed while criticizing them for not being free speech.
They are criticizing them because they heavily advertised to people that they should go to parlor claiming that it was meant to fight for free speech because Twitter and other platforms were restricting free speech. Except Parler itself was restricting free speech on it's own and thus people are rightfully pointing out the hypocrisy. It shows that Parler wasn't in favor of free speech, it was in favor of "our side".
> just not enough of the things that Amazon wanted.
One of the major allegations in the lawsuit is that the company took down everything that Amazon wanted, and that a few days ago Amazon apparently replied that they were "okay" when the materials they asked were taken down.
Seems like this will be one of the facts to establish in the suit, however it's part of the body of evidence to support the idea that 1) the suspension was a termination and 2) the termination was unwarranted which in my opinion as a complete lay person seems less sure of proving.
> Parler is founded on the idea of absolutely unmoderated speech. Even if they win this one, the writing is on the wall for them.
Absolutely untrue. Parler isn’t a free speech site. Gab on the other hand is and even they moderate. Their policy is to only allow first amendment protected speech, but that excludes quite a bit.
I believe "absolutely unmoderated" speech isn't technically correct here. As I understand it, Parler does have a form of moderation wherein a "jury" of 5 people evaluate flagged content within a 24 hour window of being flagged. If 4 vote for removal, content is removed. [1]
Naturally, if such a platform is dominated by extremists then extreme speech will remain effectively unmoderated (I can't speak to the fraction of the [former?] Parler userbase that is/was made up of violent instigators).
[1] Kara Swisher's interview with the Parler CEO on the Sway podcast (I haven't actually used Parler beyond taking a look once out of curiosity)
> Big Tech will at least pay lip service to the idea of moderation
You are not really watching if you think that is what is happening. They are controlling the narrative. They are promoting some topics and pushing down other. Facebook deleted WalkAway, a group that had full moderation, did not allow any posts which called for violence, and which was pure political speech. Reddit is deleting each and every sub that goes against what their management believes; over 2000 have been banned last year only.
They are not paying lip service. They are directing narrative. They are banning things they don't like. They are deciding which scientific exports are orthodox and which are banned. They are controlling language. They are controlling thought. If you don't think that's happening, then they are controlling your thoughts as well.
This is the most dangerous time for us to be in and this will not end well. Censorship is the tool of cowards. Censorship is the tool of authoritarians. We are literally watching Big Tech and Big Media openly rewrite history. We are in 1984 + Fahrenheit 451 and half of us have bought so far into this narrative of protectionism we do not see it at all.
But...that's what moderation is. Promoting some topics and pushing down others. Deleting certain groups which repeatedly break policies (which, by the way, are not limited to posts that call for violence). Deciding what is "orthodox" and what is not. This is common, even on this site. When a HN mod deletes a flagged thread because it doesn't follow the rules, are we all plunged into 1984 + Fahrenheit 451? When a comment is deleted and someone is baned even though they didn't literally call for violence, have they seized control of our thoughts?
The way I see it, Amazon (or Facebook etc) didn't censor Parler in the unilateral and totalitarian way you allude to. At some level, every company has to have the freedom to choose who they do business with, every person has to have the freedom to choose who they associate with. Amazon just said "no, I won't sell you AWS anymore". They didn't threaten Parler, Amazon does not have the power or authority to threaten Parler; They didn't and can't prevent Parler from choosing another provider. What's happening here is that Parler knows that no one else will voluntarily do business with them either.
Almost everyone in the industry has turned their back to Parler on their own. That cannot be censorship in the same way the lonely kid who no one wants to play with cannot be described as being censored in any meaningful sense of the word. Honestly I find it a worrying trend to be sure, but to portray individual free actions as censorship is to make the concept of censorship meaningless; It conflates the real dangers of authoritarian censorship with ordinary choices & biases that we take for granted every day.
I believe that companies are largely on their own team, neither right nor left.
How long before labor begins to be de-platformed for unionization efforts in the big tech companies? I know that there are already allegations that Amazon is acting in an extremely anti-labor way. Will the current argument of "platforms have a right to choose what content they will allow on their service" (which is a common argument for what is going on, among others) also apply in the case that pro-unionization groups are removed? These organisms will do whatever is necessary to protect themselves from what they perceive as threats, both external (political) and internal (labor).
> I believe that companies are largely on their own team, neither right nor left
Wat? Dude, Twitter, Reddit and Facebook's moderation policies are clearly left to far-left. They've done no blanket banning for calls to violence from the left. None of these people have had their pages, accounts or posts censored:
Right now the winds are prevailing from that direction, yes. Were the opposition to have a single party government I suspect things would be different. Currently anti-trust legislation looms over them and they are gravitating towards the graces of those in power as well as removing accounts that legitimately do advocate violence (albeit not as evenhandedly as they should).
I'm okay with this. We've had Republican/Conservative vs. Democrat/Liberal in every other form of media that I can remember. What's wrong with that split with "Social Media" or with hosting providers (think publishers), etc.
The problems seems to be that conservatives thought these services should be neutral but the services themselves have not thought otherwise. It will sort itself out over the next five to ten years.
Parler is being singled out because instead of hiring moderators as full-time employees like all the other companies you mention they decided to go the volunteer route that is less efficient. If Parler held themselves to a higher standard they wouldn't exist because most of its user base would complain about censorship go somewhere else.
They already had plenty of enemies on the left. Now they got a ton more on the right. Elon Musk was just tweeting about the hatred headed their way. Time to check my investments.
By the way didn't Elon Musk support the "reopen America"
crowd? Exposing your millions of followers to unscientific misinformation and downplaying covid risk so as to keep your gigafactories open and enrich yourself further? Sounds totally fine.
Left or right? No no, it's got nothing to do with that. They're in trouble because they've now got enemies in power. Did you notice things only move when those in power are threatened?
Yeah, the idea of GAFA as left wing is ludicrous. Sure, they plaster the internet with those ugly flat art cartoons of diverse people working together, (Corporate Memphis, I've learned the style is called) but they are anti-union, anti-competitive, and dedicated to growth at all cost, even if it means sectarian violence and loss of faith in democratic norms
The core difference is every other platform at least attempts to moderate and remove violent content, whereas Parker is created explicitly to publish that content.
It is weird to me that we people seem to be saying "These 4 companies need to be broken up". They are already 4 companies. It seems different than say, the Bell breakup, which was one company.
The parent said they were too powerful and needed to be brought to heel; not that they were monopolies which needed to be broken up. I think this point has a lot of merit.
Circa 2017, liberals were arguing adamantly that Russia tampered with the presidential election by exploiting the curation algorithms that these companies employ--if we can believe that these algorithms are powerful enough that they can swing an election, why should we entrust that power to a handful of companies with tightly aligned interests (irrespective of whether or not they can secure their algorithms from outside tampering)? Why should we be content with this kind of hyper corporate oligarchy? To own the cons?
Note that "breaking the companies up" isn't the only way to bring them to heel. With respect to social networks, one interesting approach would be to decouple one's social network from the specific platform through which one accesses their social network by requiring social media companies to use open protocols that upstarts can equally implement. This would increase competition, including allowing non-ad-based platforms (with all of the inherent ethical issues associated with that business model) to compete with these companies. It would also prevent these companies from shutting down alternative interfaces that circumvent their tracking. Most importantly, the competition would weaken them to the point that they're still profitable but not a threat to our democracy.
I haven't considered this possibility well enough to say with any confidence that it's a particularly good solution, but it seems interesting and appealing from this distance.
Do you remember the court testimony where Zuckerburge avoided the entire question about if they collude with other companies to make these decisions on the backend?
Apple may have banned Parler and then Google just decided to go with it, followed by AWS. However, it may also be equally valid they colluded via private channels to make this happen. BOTH ARE EQUALLY POSSIBLE.
Discovery in this kind of lawsuit may lead to the answers. If they did collude, that is a strong argument for anti-trust. Just because they're 4 different companies doesn't negate the fact they control over 80% to 90% of the American market for hosting, non-SMS text communication and mobile access.
It honestly doesn't matter what you believe about Parler's user contributions. That's the entire point of Section 230. From what I've seen they do make a good faith attempt to delete all illegal posts with direct calls to violence. Section 230 doesn't prevent Google/Apple/Amazon from being forced to have them as customers.
You are protected if you're a minority and a business refuses to give you service based on that status. Opinions and viewpoints aren't protected, and maybe they should be.
If you in any way praise this legal yet blatant corporate censorship because it fits your views, you will be next. We are not on a slippery slope. We are in a god damn free fall. If you don't see it, they will come for you next and no one will be there to speak for you.
I've been on the internet since it started and every forum I've been on has removed users and or posts for a wide range of reasons. Including just being rude, as hackernews does. So I don't really see this as any kind of "free fall". It is just the usual way of things.
It's not the usual way of things. They're not removing a few individually flagged post. FB is erasing massive numbers of communities, many just because they lean right. Reddit deleting over 2,000+ subreddits in the past year is just business as usual?
No, that's fucking targeted attacks against opinions they do not like. This is absolutely not business as usual. Everything about this is massive and it's morally reprehensible. It may not be illegal, but it's fucking wrong and insane.
It also shows that Big Tech is afraid. They're afraid and they're cowards. Regulating speech and language and blanket censorship are tools of authoritarians, not of people who believe in democracy and liberty.
Show me a single nation where censorship lead to a more free and open State.
>Just because they're 4 different companies doesn't negate the fact they control over 80% to 90% of the American market for hosting, non-SMS text communication and mobile access.
It was a ride range to indicate how large it is and meant to illustrate a point. You're asking for a fact is really just a way to say "I don't like your opinion so I'm going to challenge something that's obviously intended as a hyperbole" to discredit your statement in some arbitrary way.
Alright, AWS may not own 80% of the market, but let's be fair; it's fucking massive. On top of that Cloudflair has taken down websites before. DigitalOcean and DreamHost have removed people's hosting with less than 24 hours notice[0]. NameCheap and GoDaddy have both revoked peoples domains with less than 24 hours notice[1].
Initial searches seem to show AWS owns 50% of the market by themselves. You add in DO, Azure and GCE and that number quickly climbs[2].
Amazon leaked the email to BuzzFeed 1 hour before Parler received the email. Shocking detail if true. What was Amazon trying to do?
Quoting from the case pdf file:
"Strangely, the article with the letter was posted before Parler itself received the
letter in an email, received at 7:19 pm PST, over an hour after the BuzzFeed article
went online, meaning AWS leaked the letter to BuzzFeed before sending it to
Parler. See Exhibit A."
None of the companies involved here are monopolies, or even close to being monopolies. And this sort of 'collusion' isn't illegal - the illegal collusion is a completely different thing. Actually there isn't even any collusion of either kind to begin with.
> Twitter doesn’t do hosting, so it wouldn’t ‘compete’ with AWS for customers?
Sure, the place were an agreement of restraint of trade would be more simply possible would be something like Twitter/FB.
Though if you had a Twitter/FB pact and AWS was brought in and agreed to kick off Twitter/FB competitors that didn’t voluntarily join the Twitter/FB pact, AWS could be part of the scheme…
And a Twitter/AWS agreement alone along the same lines could be problematic, if Twitter alone had market power.
Except the lawsuit mentions AWS and twitter...not FB?
I mean sure, we can come up with all kinds of scenarios but the probably have zero relevance to the case ?
If there was some action that happened that made them all independently realize their liability, forcing them to act in similar matters, then it need not be collusion.
Users have no more legal right to act on these platforms against TOS than I do to camp on our property.
And, since there are plenty of other hosts and platforms besides these few, it will incredibly difficult to claim anti-trust.
Did you watch the most recent Zuckerberg testimony in Congress? There, Senator Hawley grilled Zuckerberg about a communication platform, SENTRA, in which Twitter, Google, Facebook, absolutely are known to collaborate on who to ban and what to ban. He shows a screenshot in the hearing to Zuckerberg, and Mark is caught weaseling in his chair about it. That is collusion.
Centra* (according to Hawley [0]) and there appears to be absolutely no proof this exists other than the word of a senator that pushed a false narrative that this election was stolen, his name is mud.
"Collusion" isn't generally a thing. Providers can lawfully cooperate for all sorts of reasons; the exceptions are the cases they can't, not the cases they can. For instance, providers could run private channels for banning users that spread CSAM (and I'd be surprised if they didn't).
And in doing so, they would be forming a centralized information cartel. And the opportunities for abuse of such systems is now more than apparent. They have effectively booted a Twitter competitor off the internet, working in concert. If that's not legal cause for antitrust action, then antitrust is no longer a thing.
Do you have an argument that would be persuasive to people who don't believe that coordinated efforts to eliminate CSAM constitute antitrust violations?
You are twisting words. Zuckerberg said he had no knowledge of a tool called that but couldn't say for sure that it didn't exist since he doesn't always know the names of all the internal tools they have. The CEO of my company doesn't know the internal names for tons of stuff we do, this isn't surprising. Also it's not proven to exist.
This is like "first they came for the socialists, then they came for the socialists, then they came for the socialists, and then they came for the socialists".
No, I mean those individual things. There may be some intersection between Alex Jones fans, Daily Stormer Fans and Reddit users ... but they're certainly not the same audiences at all.
You can replace them with anyone you want that's heterodox that's been banned honestly.
You think there may be some intersection between Alex Jones fans and Daily Stormer readers? The Stop The Steal rioters were wearing Auschwitz t-shirts.
The rioters didn't listen to Donald Trump or Alex Jones. Have you read what's come out recently?
Jones specifically told people not to riot and condemned violence. The people who broke in where already at the capitol steps while he was speaking. They literally couldn't have been incited by what Trump said.
You've been using HN primarily for political and ideological battle, and have been egregiously breaking the site guidelines with snark, name-calling, attacking others, and so on. This is against the site rules and we ban accounts that do it, regardless of which politics they're battling for.
I've banned the account. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
Alex Jones claims to have paid for the rally that preceded and instigated the riot, the one Donald Trump spoke at asking rallygoers to march on the Capitol. Candidly, I'm not interested in hair-splitting beyond that; my point is simply that Jones is closely aligned with the rioters, many of whom idolize him (as you can see on TDW). The idea that Jones is somehow in a radically different political cluster than the Q people and the Proud Boys people beggars belief; your evidence for that would have to be powerful, and would not be on "banned.video".
Parler had the same "political ideology" the week before the violence. No one cared about their ideology. Once specific violent acts occured, and calls went un-addressed on Parler for more violence, people started to care.
As long as Parler is free to use any other provider, or to host their own servers, I see no problem. I was not popular when I said that bakers may refuse (gay) clients, I will not be popular when I say that Amazon may refuse to host Parler.
Please stop pretending this was motivated only by "political ideology".
The facts are pretty simple here. Parler had illegal content on their servers and refused to moderate it effectively. Companies asked them to fix their moderation issue and they refused, this is the consequence.
They aren't being kicked off because they said "I like Trump" they are being kicked off for inciting violence and hosting content that called for some truly horrendous acts.
Please stop pretending that every other major social media platform does not or has not hosted users calling for - or actually committing - truly horrendous acts. Parler is hardly the first social media company that has had violent users.
"Handing control over." Seriously, do you have a realistic alternative? If we are going to have social media, at scale, in a capitalist society, it's hard to see how there's much of an alternative to for-profit companies. Do you want the government to run Twitter?
In some ways, yes. For example, Parler could self-host instead of relying on cloud offerings. For something controversial that will likely face legal challenges, this seems like the only reasonable way to do things (see: wikileaks, sci-hub etc.)
We could rebuild social media on the same principles as the World Wide Web, where it's not run by any single group at all. (I'd argue that's actually what we had back in the days of the "blogosphere".)
Out of curiosity how much time for remediation is generally allowed before service is pulled? Surely the precedent is not "you do something bad and we ban you immediately"?
In FTA it says AWS generally gives 30 days per their contract with Parler, but I mean in general, if there is a general precedent. Even if Parler wanted to do the right thing here, they were pretty much banned everywhere immediately.
If they aren't actively moderating offensive* content: absolutely.
I think he's going to have a REAL tough time convincing a court that Twitter doesn't moderate content given that his justification for starting Parler was Twitter being too aggressive in moderating...
Twitter didn't actively moderate the President, who broke every single policy in their rulebook, until he lost power. An argument could easily be made that they selectively enforce from that alone, but I don't see Parler's lawyers using that argument lol
I don't think that argument would be useful. The terms of the contract between Parler and AWS are not modified by the interactions AWS has with other customers.
IF a company's terms of service refer (or intend to refer) to some kind of external standard (such as federal law) why should the company itself have the power to determine what does or doesn't meet that standard.
In the USA, there's a government body which can make a preliminary judgment on this, it's called the courts. Why shouldn't Amazon be compelled to get a preliminary opinion from a judge on whether this is illegal or not. Based on that decision they can preemptively remove the content and let the defendant "appeal" (probably incorrect legal term) the decision. If the court rules it's not illegal, then there should be no risk of legal liability to continuing to provide the service.
If things are parler are as bad as people are making it out to be (i haven't been following it closely) then this should be a trivial step that legitimizes the decision.
Amazon may have the right to deny anyone service - but can they do it 'immediately' on whatever grounds?
Parler could very well make more money suing Amazon than anything else.
This was a huge moment for Parler, and AMZN may have grounded them.
There's a difference between 'we don't want to do business with you' ... and 'we will make you dependent on us, but the we'll drop you like a rock and put you out of business'.
you lost me on the last part there, you can't have it both ways. if they don't want to do business with you they don't have to point blank (barring any outstanding contracts which can be settled).
as a business you choose to take risks relying on other vendors. we're all dependent on any business and they could drop us at any time, but that's the risk we take for convenience or what not. we make the calculation the risk is low.
if you know there's a growing base of extremism on your site and you have a precedent like gab, why wouldn't you potentially prepare for it?
> Do you know how many of the people arrested in connection with the Capitol invasion were active users of Parler? Zero. The planning was largely done on Facebook. This is all a bullshit pretext for silencing competitors on ideological grounds: just the start.
> For those asking the basis for that last claim: I spent the weekend reporting on the removal of Parler from the internet, including reviewing lots of documents and interviewing people associated with the companies involved, including Parler.
> The article will be up shortly.
https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1348619731734028293
I would be more interested in hearing if all these prominent figures in the Capitol protests were active across multiple (or all) social media platforms, which often seems to be the case. If that is true, then it makes for an even stronger argument that Parler has been singled out.