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Parler drops offline after Amazon pulls support

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Re: Parler drops offline after Amazon pulls support

#751
post #722
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…

[deleted]

Re: Parler drops offline after Amazon pulls support

#752

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>in 15 years, the U.S. becomes Germany, pre-WW2 >the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. The irony of censoring people being, “the price of freedom”. Serious question, why do you think that disenfranchising groups of their ability to communicate online is going to prevent social strife and violence instead of intensifying it? Banning theDonald didn’t help, the Daily Stormer being banished from the web didn’t chang…

People need to stop hiding behind the first amendment and "but censorship" as a way of allowing democracy-threatening activity. Speech has ALWAYS had limitations. You cannot yell "fire" in a movie theatre. You cannot publish falsehoods that harm a person's reputation. You cannot reveal classified information. You cannot imitate a police officer. Why is "you cannot incite violent terrorism" suddenly controversial? Particularly when these are private corporations making the decisions, who are not duty-bound to enable free spech in the first place?

Re: Parler drops offline after Amazon pulls support

#753

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…

> What are the best mitigations here, both technical and social? Buy a server?

Buy a server where?

Re: Parler drops offline after Amazon pulls support

#754
post #721

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…

It sounds very reasonable up until attempting to identify what, objectively, is the bar to set business policy. Twitter literally claims that "To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th." was the straw that broke the camels back [0]. That isn't an objective bar. Context which "everyone knows" is a political question - a highly political question. If AWS happens to have a s…

> Twitter literally claims that "To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th." was the straw that broke the camels back [0]. That isn't an objective bar.

When President Trump published this tweet, he knew full well extremists are actively planning to attack the inauguration on January 20th.

There isn't a clear, objective bar in this kind of situation. Jack Dorsey, Tim Cook, Sundar Pichai, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos each decided for themselves if they were willing to stand by and allow Trump and Parler to continue along the path of inciting violence on January 20th.

Re: Parler drops offline after Amazon pulls support

#755

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember very well as a middle eastern how ISIS was freely allowed to use Twitter, Facebook and Youtube for recruitment and propaganda in 2015 and none of those platforms did anything about it. Also just today this story was on the front page in HN: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/06/technology/myanmar-facebo... So spare us all the "No hate and violence on our platform" BS. Either you go after all hate and violence…

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?

Revealing a political bias evidenced by selective enforcement is not "whataboutism." It's informing motive.

Re: Parler drops offline after Amazon pulls support

#756
post #721

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…

It sounds very reasonable up until attempting to identify what, objectively, is the bar to set business policy. Twitter literally claims that "To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th." was the straw that broke the camels back [0]. That isn't an objective bar. Context which "everyone knows" is a political question - a highly political question. If AWS happens to have a s…

That is a wild misrepresentation of the facts.

That was the second of two tweets, that they are taking together. This was the other

"The 75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me, AMERICA FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE long into the future. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!”

They explain the context and how these tweets are being interpreted.

Re: Parler drops offline after Amazon pulls support

#758
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…

I am optimistic that we won't tumble down the slippery slope. We do need to be careful about it, though, and watch for threats to democracy from all angles. IMO it wouldn't be such a bad thing if this instance weakened the market dominance of SV and gave room in the market for new entrants. Hosting providers outside U.S. jurisdiction, for example, or decentralized social networks.

Re: Parler drops offline after Amazon pulls support

#759
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 strategy here is to engage your vendors with private contracts instead of depending on generic terms of service (ToS) alone. Every company I've worked with has negotiated separate agreements with providers to reduce risk. Including contracts with both AWS and Azure. If your business gets to a certain size and you are still on the generic ToS and paying by credit card you have a big risk on your ha…

I don't think it's possible to secure a contract with such favorable terms that you can not get cut off for inciting physical violence on government property. OP would also need to be a fairly large player to able to negotiate favorable terms with someone like AWS to begin with.

Re: Parler drops offline after Amazon pulls support

#760

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…

No, parlor wasn't even doing a "good enough job". It wasn't doing _anything_. It's financial backers supported everything with regards to its users going into a violent frenzy. There really is nothing contentious here, unless you feel that if you know that a group is organizing in your platform with the intent of staging a coup then you're in your right to just let them go about it.

No, Parler was doing plenty of moderation. They actively suppressed opposing left-wing view points. It was a pure far-right agitation machine.
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