Parler drops offline after Amazon pulls support • Hacker News Board

Re: Parler drops offline after Amazon pulls support

#791

Post by oneeyedpigeon » Mon, Jan 11, 2021, 10:19 PM UTC

humannature1 wrote: post #776

Daishiman wrote: post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I had an account there for about six months before it went offline. It wasn't a particularly interesting or compelling website. Most people viewed posts of affiliates; there were some memes but most of it was just conservative talking points. The average post being "this person or movement is a jerk because..." I personally never witnessed any violent discussion on Parler. Again, the website was less compelling than…

I'd appreciate it if you could avoid the term "leftist" in future - this may be a cultural thing, but here in the UK, it's almost always used as a derogatory slur. I get the impression that's also true in NA, but forgive me if that isn't the case.

Can you provide an example of a violent statement posted on Twitter by AOC?

Re: Parler drops offline after Amazon pulls support

#792

Post by flukus » Mon, Jan 11, 2021, 10:19 PM UTC

jlkuester7 wrote: post #489

gnicholas wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It appears there is a business opportunity to (re)create infrastructure for use by companies/individuals that have been banned from the mainstream platforms. I'm sure such a platform would be despised by many in the mainstream, and most mainstream companies would not consider using them because customers would boycott them if they did. But for companies whose customers are primarily on the right, the cost/benefit cou…

The two big issues that come to mind with this are DNS and SSL certs. AFIK both are really hard spaces to become a "provider", so you end up being reliant on the existing providers to do business with you. Sure there are decentralized solutions to these problems, but none of them really let you operate in the "normal" internet space...

If we're going to talk about universal access obligations then this should be where we start, this is real unavoidable infrastructure.

Yet we don't often see calls for this from anyone worried about deplatforming, they're more worried about having an audience than a right.

Re: Parler drops offline after Amazon pulls support

#793

Post by oh_sigh » Mon, Jan 11, 2021, 10:20 PM UTC

pitterpatter wrote: post #779

munchbunny wrote: post #764

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't the ability to decide what issue your bring to a space and then deciding which issues you'll "take no position" a privilege? Why is it privilege to avoid discussing politics in a gardening group? I'll grant that "take no position" can be a privileged position in some contexts, but a gardening group discussion seems pretty clearly not one of those contexts.

I mean to tie it to a more concrete example: Take the incident with the white lady and the black guy who was bird watching in New York. I'm pretty sure he'd love nothing more than to be able enjoy his pretty chill hobby of bird watching without it becoming racial or political or what have you. But the fact of the matter is that's not his choice. So yea, being able to say you don't take a position in politics can defi…

The black guy was the one who attempted to lure her dog away from her to teach her a lesson by "doing something she's not going to like" to her dog(which certainly sounds like a threat).

He admitted to carrying dog treats with him to do just that. And then he posted the video online, attracting even more attention to what would normally just be a "crazy people are crazy" experience that you get in NY when you confront strangers for bad behavior.

I've been accused by a crazy person on the subway of being a rapist, but that doesn't mean that I'm oppressed for being a male of a certain color. It was just a crazy person doing crazy things.

Re: Parler drops offline after Amazon pulls support

#794

Post by Dma54rhs » Mon, Jan 11, 2021, 10:20 PM UTC

hchz wrote: post #698

Closi wrote: post #683

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 don't think it is though - the point is who decides if the democratic election was fair? What happens in a foreign country if their government decides the election isn't fair? Should people be silenced? Or is it Amazon's job now to work out if worldwide elections a…

The United States Government decided it was fair, in many administrative and legal venues, across the country. Many Republican officials and judges affirmed it, even under intense and illegal pressure from the President and his cadre. This platform was used to coordinate an insurrection against the United States Government, and refused to act against those doing so. The severity of insurrection in US legal code is su…

Despite being headquartered in USA, aws is a global company and these questions about the future is common sense. Not everything is about American politics, people around the world are used to violence happening on your soil, it's just another news.

Re: Parler drops offline after Amazon pulls support

#795

Post by ncallaway » Mon, Jan 11, 2021, 10:22 PM UTC

sli wrote: post #788

ncallaway wrote: post #767

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Twitter literally claims that "To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th. Well, no, they didn't claim that. They claimed the two tweets, taken together, were the straw that broke the camel's back. And, yes, I think you could reasonably make the claim that the tweets were innocuous if you throw out the context of the President inciting a violent insurrection on Congress.…

> taken together Taken together primarily, along with numerous other tweets in secondary. It wasn't just those two.

Sure, I agree, but I thought that was kind of implicit in the phrase "straw that broke the camels back". This was the latest individual thing, sitting on a mountain of other things, that finally caused the dam to break.

Re: Parler drops offline after Amazon pulls support

#796

Post by riwsky » Mon, Jan 11, 2021, 10:22 PM UTC

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…

Except Amazon aren’t determining what is true for the world, they’re determining it for themselves based on their assessment of the evidence and control only their own actions? This is true of everyone. To impute a stupid decision-making algorithm to AWS and then point out that it’s stupid does not a great argument against AWS’ actual process make.

Re: Parler drops offline after Amazon pulls support

#797

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jan 11, 2021, 10:22 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Parler drops offline after Amazon pulls support

#798

Post by danans » Mon, Jan 11, 2021, 10:23 PM UTC

hinkley wrote: post #685

danans wrote: post #623

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. There is no daylight between the the Daily Stormer and Parler with respect to their willingness to distribute content that promotes far right violence. The…

As someone who is in theory trying to write software for community-sourced documentation and advice, I've been dragging my heels for years watching things play out on reddit and facebook and twitter and now these buffoons and I just don't know if I'm up to the task. My best defense seems to be trying to keep the niche as small as possible and still be worth my while to do the work, and to be perfectly honest, as 'rea…

> "keep it small" to myself drains quite a bit of motivation out of me.

Just moderate the platform to remove content that is an incitement to violence or the commission of violent crime. That's a pretty low bar to meet.

Re: Parler drops offline after Amazon pulls support

#799

Post by vivekl » Mon, Jan 11, 2021, 10:24 PM UTC

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…

This problem would have been even more pronounced if running from a co-lo/non-cloud entity. Imagine getting a court-ordered shutdown or confiscation of servers for evidence etc. Frankly you would expect a "high"-profile/controversial service like Parler to have at least conceived of the possibility of a take-down from a cloud service and had a plan in place for it. Amazon had already cut ties with Gab last year [1] so this should not have been a huge surprise.

[1] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/far-right-haven...

Re: Parler drops offline after Amazon pulls support

#800

Post by munificent » Mon, Jan 11, 2021, 10:24 PM UTC

Closi wrote: post #357

munificent wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I hear a lot of people saying this is just another example of the left trying to shut down free speech This is a specious argument on its face. The First Amendment does not say that private companies are obligated to spend money broadcasting someone else's speech. Hosting and serving isn't free and any private company has the freedom to decide what not to host. If an author's content is so toxic that advertisers wo…

> This is a specious argument on its face. The First Amendment does not say that private companies are obligated to spend money broadcasting someone else's speech. Hosting and serving isn't free and any private company has the freedom to decide what not to host. I'm in the UK, but the difference is that right now, these private companies control communication. I'm not allowed outside my house and I live alone. I'm no…

> these private companies control communication.

I think verbs are important. Another way to say this is that these companies enable or provide communication.

Imagine that COVID-19 had hit in the 80s before we had all of this. It would have been miserable, isolating, tragic. But would it make sense to blame the tech companies we have now for not existing then? Would it have been someone's fault?

> All my communication with everyone I know is done via private companies.

Another way to frame that is just to be thankful that those companies are there to enable that communication.

That, of course, doesn't mean they are free from moral consequences or anything. But we are only beholden to them because they are providing us so much value.

> The protections around freedom of speech were put in at a time where it was inconceivable that a huge majority of worldwide speech could be mass-monitored and auto-censored by a few giant private companies that self-police what can and can't be said

It was also authored in a time where "broadcasting" meant literally printing copies of pamphlets and physically depositing them in every town square you wanted to reach.

I don't know if we have any clue how the Founding Fathers of the US would have interpreted today's communication systems. I think we need principles that are designed for the structures we do have without necessarily assuming any at-the-time-excellent principle from the 1700s must be directly mapped to today's needs.