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Parler drops offline after Amazon pulls support

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Parler drops offline after Amazon pulls support

#731

Post by bhelkey »

hayd wrote: post #703
FeepingCreature wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And if all the bakers in town refuse to bake you a cake, should you be able to force one to? Yes. edit: Well, they could also close all of their bakeries. I'm willing to allow them that option.

The same argument applies if you wanted to commission a cake celebrating the holocaust. The distinction must be that anyone (any race, any sexual orientation, etc. etc.) should be able to buy anything "off the shelf" (e.g. a plain cake or wedding cake). But no one should be forced to write/design/create something which they don't want to. My bakery should be allowed to refuse to bake a cake celebrating the holocaust.

In your opinion, should bakeries be allowed to refuse to make a custom wedding cake for the wedding of a gay couple? (e.g. Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masterpiece_Cakeshop_v._Colora...

Re: Parler drops offline after Amazon pulls support

#732

Post by disgrunt »

hitpointdrew wrote: post #723
cactus2093 wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What are the best mitigations here, both technical and social? Vocally side with the popular issues, or try to stay completely out of them, to try to avoid becoming a target (e.g., social media presence)? For now, don't attempt to overturn a fair democratic election and install an illegitimate government. Seems like a pretty easy thing to stay clear of. I get the concern you're expressing, but not everything is a s…

>For now, don't attempt to overturn a fair democratic election and install an illegitimate government. Seems like a pretty easy thing to stay clear of. Parler didn't do this, it's users did. Vastly different things.

Which has always been Twitter's defense when similar things happened on their platform. Shouldn't 230 apply here?

Re: Parler drops offline after Amazon pulls support

#733

Post by rimliu »

burade wrote: post #729
imperio59 wrote: post #668

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bullying is real. My wife and I run a side Business Saas product. She is listed as COO on her social media profile for the company. She is also in a bunch of groups about gardening in our local area. During the height of BLM protests and CHOP/CHAZ, someone made a post that was very off-topic for the group, basically saying we should all support what was happening in the CHOP and all the violence against cops was just…

That's not even close to bullying. Bullying is more like a 14 year old black kid getting beaten to death by a group of adult white men, who were later acquitted. And you know very well what would happen if the races were reversed.

That's murder.

Re: Parler drops offline after Amazon pulls support

#734

Post by michannne »

hinkley wrote: post #587
jlkuester7 wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> not everything is a slippery slope From a risk management perspective, this does not seem like a safe assumption to make. The DailyStormer got "canceled" by vendors for not even trying to moderate content that actively promoted violence (among other horrible things). Now Parlor gets "canceled" by vendors for not doing a good enough job trying to moderate content promoting violence. The bar for getting "canceled" is…

The result of doing nothing is that in 15 years, the US becomes Germany, pre-WW2. You can think of it as vendors getting 'canceled' for progressively less severe offenses. Or. You can think of it as people waking up to offenses that have been allowed to go unchallenged for way too fucking long. People 'waking up' or no longer keeping their heads down being the result of the current administration transitioning to a L…

>You can think of it as people waking up to offenses that have been allowed to go unchallenged for way too fucking long

"People" is a general term, "offense" is a relative term. What you may consider an offense, I might consider a complement. Additionally, what you consider an offense today, you might not do so tomorrow. There is no such thing as a static set of provisions that can handle all cases of immorality across all of time and satisfy all people.

>The price of Freedom is Eternal Vigilance

The price of freedom is nothing, the price of consequence is eternal vigilance. The only reason you would need to be alerted if someone commits an offense you deem immoral, is so that they can be punished for the offense. You can't reverse an act that someone committed, but sure if you have constant oversight of their actions you can definitely punish them as you see fit. Law is synonymous with punishment, but it is punishment that applies universally to all parties, as opposed to the Terms of Service applied by modern corporations, which (by design) can be applied to whomever and can be ignored for whomever the corporation feels like. Hence why it's a slippery slope.

Re: Parler drops offline after Amazon pulls support

#735

Post by FentanylFloyd »

Consultant32452 wrote: post #682
cactus2093 wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What are the best mitigations here, both technical and social? Vocally side with the popular issues, or try to stay completely out of them, to try to avoid becoming a target (e.g., social media presence)? For now, don't attempt to overturn a fair democratic election and install an illegitimate government. Seems like a pretty easy thing to stay clear of. I get the concern you're expressing, but not everything is a s…

> For now, don't attempt to overturn a fair democratic election and install an illegitimate government. I agree 100%, viking hat guy should definitely have his AWS account terminated. Now, let's talk about Russiagate, how the FBI knew it was a fabrication of the opposition party to distract from a campaign scandal, and how we were dragged all the way through an impeachment process in an attempt to install an illegiti…

you are not supposed to mention this, your hackernews and aws account should be terminated for wrongthink

and don't forget: BLM "protests" were "fiery, but mostly peaceful" https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/035/101/CNN...

Re: Parler drops offline after Amazon pulls support

#736

Post by Closi »

eloff wrote: post #722
Tepix wrote: post #692

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the point is who decides if the democratic election was fair? That one is easy: it was approximately 60 different courts of law that laughed the "evidence" of fraud out of the room

It's not that easy. If we're talking about an election in Venezuela, the courts would also laugh accusations of election rigging out of the room. To be clear, I fully side with the U.S. courts here. What I'm saying though is governments and officials lie, you can't always just trust the official story. If parler were used for inciting civil disorder in Venezuela over the election result and the government comes to AW…

100% agree - And the problem is that this isn't a 'hypothetical' situation.

Amazon and these large players will absolutely be asked by governments around the world to intervene in similar situations. Sometimes the fraud will be false, but sometimes it will be real - that's the world. Is it now Amazon's job to be the world election supervisor and arbiter of truth and shut down dissenting speech?

And can we trust these companies to act as neutral arbiters of the truth? (As an aside, the answer is absolutely not. See: Google Maps and Crimea / Ukraine / Russia)

Re: Parler drops offline after Amazon pulls support

#737

Post by kmeisthax »

zmb_ wrote: post #321

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…

"Every cloud vendor in the world telling you off" is a particular threat model only usually encountered by literal terrorist groups, torrent sites, Sci-Hub... and now right-wing filter-bubbles.

In this case, Parler will need to either build all their own infrastructure or sign up with some really skeevy second-world hosting sites. This, interestingly, means being hosted on the same servers that host actual terrorists like Hamas; if they intend to remain a legal corporate outfit their lawyers will probably have some very strong words about using such services. Building your own infrastructure is expensive, even without the particular threat of just being Parler. Notably, net neutrality has been dead in the water ever since Trump took office, so anything high-value becomes extraordinarily expensive fast.

I doubt other sites are going to face this same problem in the future. Parler's problem is not that they're on the "wrong side" of a political debate; it's that they deliberately aided and abetted the planning of literal insurrection. Providing any sort of service to them is a huge legal risk to your enterprise now. If the bar for technical deplatforming was lowered beyond "technically legal", you'd see the market for alternative infrastructure providers open up, because those are customers that AWS/Google Cloud/Azure are no longer serving. AWS can only "get away with" deplatforming Parler specifically due to the legally risky nature of working with them.

Re: Parler drops offline after Amazon pulls support

#738

Post by Jochim »

macinjosh wrote: post #352
explorigin wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was also curious about Parler but, when going to sign up, it asked for my phone number. Ummmm, no thank you. That kind of association is like going to a protest with your cellphone. Pretty easy to get the wrong kind of association attached to you.

> Pretty easy to get the wrong kind of association attached to you. How sad is it that our free society has turned into this? So much for tolerance.

This isn't new. McCarthyism is the example almost everyone knows.

Re: Parler drops offline after Amazon pulls support

#739

Post by throwaways885 »

baron_harkonnen wrote: post #435
mozillalives wrote: post #44

All I’m going to say is that I’m all for free speech and setting fair rules for everyone to play by (ie regulation), but looking at the examples provided in the buzzfeed articles this is beyond simple free speech. I hear a lot of people saying this is just another example of the left trying to shut down free speech but there are clear threats being made on the platform. If Parler doesn’t want to do any content regula…

> the left trying to shut down free speech People really have no idea what the "left" even is anymore do they? I was once down voted here for mentioning that the NYTimes is not an extreme left wing publication. The NYTimes is a centrist liberal publication that is widely reviled by anyone on the left. It's amazing to me that the media (not just Fox-news and co) has constructed this bizarre bogey-man of the left as so…

> However, equally surprising to me, is the number of pro-big tech company HN people who are suddenly deeply concerned about unchecked corporate power. People who two weeks ago would claim that companies should drive out employees who disagree with them, now wish these companies were subject to the will of the people. You can't spend a lifetime fighting to reduce the power of the federal government and then be surprised at all that large corporations are the ones deciding our public policy.

I wouldn't say these are in conflict. The biggest reason I oppose political movement in SV corporations is because I believe they'd become even more censorious than they are now. Today's corporations are evil to make money and protect their brand, but I don't want tomorrow's corporations to be evil for a political ideology.

Re: Parler drops offline after Amazon pulls support

#740

Post by teddyh »

bawolff wrote: post #639
zmb_ wrote: post #321

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…

The best mitigation is negotiating strong contracts with significant penalties if the provider does not provide the services promised. Its not like getting screwed over because a vendor changes its mine about fulfilling its obligations half way through is a new issue, this is just a bit of an exceptional case of that.

“Your faith in the legal system is appalling.”

https://www.schlockmercenary.com/2009-06-26

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