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Parler CEO Says Service Dropped by “Every Vendor” and Could End His Business

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Re: Parler CEO Says Service Dropped by “Every Vendor” and Could End His Business

#81
post #26

How far should this go? Should banks refuse to service employees? Grocery stores? Gas stations? They are private businesses, they have no reason to tolerate people who are thinking the wrong way.

There's two questions which we should distinguish:

1. Should there be a bright-line rule - either enforced by government or strong social pressure - about whether people must engage in business with other people, and on what grounds they may discriminate?

2. Should there be a social norm that businesses should try to serve all customers where possible, for the good of customers?

Our society generally answers 1 with that you must refrain from discriminating on the grounds of deep personal characteristics and no otherwise. You cannot throw someone out of your bar for being black. You can throw them out for being drunk and picking fights. You cannot refuse to hire an employee who needs to take a few breaks a day to pray. You can refuse to hire an employee who needs to take a few breaks a day to hire Fiverrs to do their job for them. You cannot refuse to offer credit cards to ethnic North Koreans living in America. You can (and must!) refuse to offer credit cards to North Korean citizens.

This is a sensible position, because it balances the general right to freedom of association / the government not micromanaging your business transactions with the more specific individual rights to participate in society. I cannot change my race, and (we have decided) it's unreasonable to expect me to change my religion. I can (we have decided) change my competence, and I can certainly change whether I start bar fights.

We could decide otherwise, but I think the existing position has a lot of merit.

Number 2 is a more interesting question, but I think the norm of our society is that it should be answered by the free market. We expect that businesses want to serve as many customers as possible anyway because it's the most profitable. Should they decide that they don't want to serve certain customers, it's generally not the place of either the government or strong social norms to say, we wish to override your decision-making process and tell you what to do (apart from the bright-line rule in question 1). Part of the freedom of a free market is that actors are free to decide what to do on their own, including to make mistakes, and no central planning committee tells them what is best for society. We expect this approach will lead to fewer mistakes and a better society.

Again, I think this position has a lot of merit, and we should figure out why we want to change it.

Re: Parler CEO Says Service Dropped by “Every Vendor” and Could End His Business

#82
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Said the church to the scientist. Said the mob to the witch. Be careful about where this goes. This one doesn't affect you and I, but the next one might. It certainly will when it gets to HN or Signal. But then it'll be too late. First they came for...

Ehhh I've looked at parler out of curiosity. Basically full of hate, conspiracy, calls for violence, blatant racism "kill blacks" type stuff. I'm amazed companies were willing to work with them in the first place. Providing services to a company like that is like providing service to the KKK

Is this speech illegal?

Re: Parler CEO Says Service Dropped by “Every Vendor” and Could End His Business

#83
post #29

I’d hate to be in his position right now. Business wise, i hope they have backups and hire people for moderation.

When your business is fascism you deserve this. I don’t see this being all that different from having an open marketplace for assassinations or contract killings.

Hey, don't insult Silk Road like that.

Re: Parler CEO Says Service Dropped by “Every Vendor” and Could End His Business

#85
post #26

How far should this go? Should banks refuse to service employees? Grocery stores? Gas stations? They are private businesses, they have no reason to tolerate people who are thinking the wrong way.

In what sense are big banks private businesses? Banks, especially the big ones, will always be bailed out in a crisis. We've just had a demonstration about a decade ago.

Everyone gets bailouts at some level, hence welfare, stimulus cheques, Medicare and Medicaid in the US. More so over here (Brit).

Financial services get very heavily regulated which imposes huge costs, so it is arguable that imposes a certain level of obligation on government. I think that’s a reasonable case, though I’m not entirely happy with the way it’s been handled in practice. It’s not a perfect world.

Re: Parler CEO Says Service Dropped by “Every Vendor” and Could End His Business

#86

> "They made an attempt to not only kill the app, but to actually destroy the entire company. And it’s not just these three companies. Every vendor from text message services to email providers to our lawyers all ditched us too on the same day." If everybody else is an asshole, maybe you're the asshole.

Everybody was not an asshole for the two years this existed and suddenly became one a mere week ago. Strange, innit?

Re: Parler CEO Says Service Dropped by “Every Vendor” and Could End His Business

#87
post #80

I am very concerned about the ease and speed with which they have been deplatformed. I am not a big fan of Parler, but I am a very big fan of free speech, and if the various actors who have driven them out of business can act this quickly in this well-coordinated, what else could they decide to censor?

The issue is that these platforms have grown to monopolistic or duopolistic size, NOT that a private company has the right to sever a business relationship.

It’s an antitrust issue, not a free speech issue.

Re: Parler CEO Says Service Dropped by “Every Vendor” and Could End His Business

#88
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean you can't run a site with no censorship where people are openly plotting the violent takeover of the us government and/or violent events. It is just a liability issue. This isn't some kind of censorship issue, that just isn't legal and never has been legal.

The great irony here is Parler DOES engage in loads of censorship (no parody, no Pro-Cannabis comments, no positive antifa comments, I don't think you can even be left wing on there). So I'm stuck defending a censorous site against censorship!? I am a weirdo, because a public site like Parler is exactly where I hope insurrection should be planned. Why wasn't the FBI ready to swoop and arrest actual violent people giv…

> Why wasn't the FBI ready to swoop and arrest actual violent people given they were posting their plans in plane view?

I assume because the vast majority of such posts were and are fantasies masquerading as plans, and there aren't the resources to set up stings for each such "plan".

Re: Parler CEO Says Service Dropped by “Every Vendor” and Could End His Business

#89

> "They made an attempt to not only kill the app, but to actually destroy the entire company. And it’s not just these three companies. Every vendor from text message services to email providers to our lawyers all ditched us too on the same day." If everybody else is an asshole, maybe you're the asshole.

There have been enough mob rule systems in history to prove that saying entirely wrong.

Was Oppenheimer an asshole during the McCarthy hysteria?

Was Solschenizyn an asshole during communism?

We are seeing similar methods of silencing now, starting with universities, open source projects and now free speech apps in monopolies or oligopolies that should be forced to adhere to common carrier rules.

Re: Parler CEO Says Service Dropped by “Every Vendor” and Could End His Business

#90

> "They made an attempt to not only kill the app, but to actually destroy the entire company. And it’s not just these three companies. Every vendor from text message services to email providers to our lawyers all ditched us too on the same day." If everybody else is an asshole, maybe you're the asshole.

Yet Galileo was indefinitely imprisoned for denying a geocentric model of the universe, which Everyone Knew to be True. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_affair The point is that the majority is often wrong, and consensus does not confer virtue. (I am deliberately making no remark on this instance; I am speaking purely of the underlying principle.)

This underlying principle would argue that democracy itself is unjust, and that we cannot, say, have laws against murder simply because the majority of people think that murder is bad. What if it's actually good? Consensus does not infer virtue. Shall we suspend all laws?

The answer is that, while such an argument is technically true, we have yet to find a better way to structure society. Your example of Galileo strongly suggests that we should not hand over this sort of decision-making to princes or priests, which are the usual alternatives to the ballot box. The judgment of the majority is regularly wrong, but it is also the most regularly not-wrong thing we know about.

If you think the majority is wrong, convince them that they are wrong. It will take time. I'm sorry there isn't a better way.

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