371–380 of 1001 posts
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Whataboutism! Whataboutism! The fact that a platform didn’t do the right thing before, doesn’t mean it can’t do it now. What, you came out of the womb with perfect understanding of right from wrong?
I don't think Twitter had any difficulty discerning right from wrong when it came to ISIS, even back in 2016.
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Actually, Parler has been use to literally plan an overthrow of the US government. That's why it's banned. So far, Parler and its associates have come a lot closer to dismantling American democracy than Iran ever has. That's why they get taken more seriously. Neither Twitter, nor Apple, nor Amazon want to be responsible for the rise of a fascist regime in the US. Too often, you can't see the rise of authoritarianism…
Respectfully, I think you missed the point. There are many voices on parler not out to overthrow anything. You may disagree with them, but they are within the mainstream of political debate. The power of a tech oligarchy to take out its competitor is a serious violation of anti-trust law. There are less ham-fisted approaches to dealing with illegal activity. The DOJ and FBI have effective means to do it.
To all the HN users defending Parler by drawing false equivalencies to BLM, the NYTimes, Saudi Arabia, and China, without acknowledging the events of The last few months: shame on you. Parler and it’s moderator team , as well as Donald Trump, has supported COVID denial, the election fraud conspiracy, and Q conspiracy, for over a year. This was a concentrated effort to brain wash American conservatives to completely d…
seriously. millions of conservatives are still on twitter/fb with no censorship. some of the biggest conservative "celebs" built their audiences on twitter and benefit from the outrage machine. it's so hilariously out of touch and ironic to me that they are criticizing these actions uncensored and then trying to make slippery slope arguments or play the persecuted minority. what happened to parler is the exception, n…
This being HN I expected more commentary around how a company can/should build technology to survive such incidents, and not go down just because one of your providers either blocked you or themselves went down.
If you are an illegal business there are a multitude of ways of working around many of these issues (using fake identities with hosting companies and other services, making money via shady malware riddled ad services, money laundering, etc...)
Until recently I thought that p2p/crypto/etc was the solution but since you cannot do true p2p in the browser and must ship native code, at the end of the day you will still need the blessing of Apple/Google/Microsoft and agree to their TOS to exist. Of course this is perfect storm that happens rarely but it's still chilling to watch it unfold despite how contemptible the target is.
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> Parler wasn't some innocent social media site that happened > to have some disgusting content on it. You can't state that as fact. The platform itself was not inherently about spreading objectionable material. It was about being more free than Twitter. > And I have yet to hear anyone discuss how "anything goes" > and social media do not mix. As with all free speech, it had legal limits, such as threats of violence.…
> You can't state that as fact. The platform itself was not inherently about spreading objectionable material. It was about being more free than Twitter. No man, it wasn't. They are just lying to you. Try to be more credulous. https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200627/23551144803/as-pr...
Also the Parler system is that you essentially are sandboxed for a short period of time when you first join - if you get tonnes of negative responses you get removed. So the fact they got removed in the first 24 hours makes sense.
So: No man, it wasn't. They are just lying to you. Try to be more credulous.
Parler wasn't some innocent social media site that happened to have some disgusting content on it. The disgusting content was literally its reason for existing, despite all of the bland "we're just a free speech site" stuff. And I have yet to hear anyone discuss how "anything goes" and social media do not mix. It's much easier to turn a community toxic than it is to keep it healthy, and healthy communities (of any so…
I’ll address your second point: We do need to think about the precedents we are setting with respect to free speech. It’s possible that action might be needed in the short term to moderate these channels. But we must also consider the longer term in a world that is rapidly evolving. I’m less concerned about specific, currently existing platforms like Parler, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. These “social media” platfo…
The doom may be inevitable. who knows? I don't mean to be a defeatist. But I would say if a single private entity (or alliance) did control all digital communication, any actions they took could be invisible to anyone that opposed them, assuming they had sufficiently advanced machine learning capable of preventing subversive communication. You would need alternative options for communication, digital or otherwise to have any hope of overcoming such a hypothetical scenario.
My hope would be that we continue to have utilities such as phone lines, that internet would ultimately end up treated as a utility in the same sense as phone lines (especially if it completely replaces them, which is largely is doing), radio (just as ham radio operators believe in the importance of maintaining their systems), etc.
And my other hope would be that we continue to legislate and enforce against monopolies, not just on capitalistic entities but especially on privately run communication channels.
Serious question, it seems AWS is by no means a monopoly on web hosting (Google, Azure, Digital Ocean, Linode, the list goes on). It seems to be they're well within their rights as a company to not host Parler, and Parler can try to go somewhere else. If no other companies want to host Parler, isn't that more a reflection of Parler than the hosting companies? It doesn't seem like they should be obligated to host, sin…
You can ask the question of whether you think in general that marginalized voices should be allowed to exist. Obviously, you don't like these particular people (and neither do I) so you don't see any problem with eradicating their voice. If Amazon were just one provider and there were other options it might even then still be OK. But it's not just a choice of Amazon. Any provider hosting them will be subject to the c…
In your example it's probably slightly different because religion is a protected class, while political leanings aren't.
I think what's particularly interesting is you substitute "right wing" with "Jews" like you did, and you start to wonder if Amazon crossed the line. But then change "Jew" to "terrorist", and you think Amazon might be in the right. Clearly we can't protect ALL groups, that'd be silly.
I'm struggling to try to understand what this means for the risks of running a business in the cloud going forward. It was not just AWS dropping them, but many of their other vendors dropped them too, essentially killing their business overnight. Granted, for this first case the bar was extremely high. You needed literal storming of the Capitol and a platform seemingly specifically targeted at those people for this t…
Serious question, it seems AWS is by no means a monopoly on web hosting (Google, Azure, Digital Ocean, Linode, the list goes on). It seems to be they're well within their rights as a company to not host Parler, and Parler can try to go somewhere else. If no other companies want to host Parler, isn't that more a reflection of Parler than the hosting companies? It doesn't seem like they should be obligated to host, sin…
I would put my money that if Parler goes to any of the web hosting services you listed, they will still be deplatformed.
Is it like a game of hot potato where the last hosting company has to host them? Because it seems there are alternatives to each individually, and it's only when they all say no that there are issues for Parler. And to me that feels like a Parler problem, not an AWS problem.