Parler is back on Amazon via Donut via Epik.
Parler drops offline after Amazon pulls support
971–980 of 1001 posts
Re: Parler drops offline after Amazon pulls support
#972Could a Muslim owned cloud service drop a gay customer, say an app like Grindr? I recall a case about a baker and a gay couple or something. Is this a civil matter or criminal? I grew up in a different era seriously none of this makes sense. Which groups are legally allowed to cancel the others? Where is that set forth in law? Thanks.
In the US? Protected classes. This is the idea that some discrimination is so pervasive and damaging that it needs protection from the law, despite the fact that that directly conflicts with the idea that businesses should be able to be run as the owner likes. The harm of the latter is small compared to the harm of allowing the former, so the argument goes (and which I agree with, not that that matters to the answer).
If I decide my soup shop won't serve you because you ask a question or put your money on the counter instead of handing it to me, no problem, questions askers are not a protected class. You can trivially go to the restaurant next door and get served. If I decide I won't serve soup to anyone in a same sex relationship, someone of Jewish descent, women, or whatever, then there are legal protections in place that prohibit me from doing that.
I am not a lawyer, but this goes back before you were born. There was the civil Rights act of 1866 which banned discrimination due to race or color. The Civil Rights act of 1964 added sex, national origin, religion. In 1967 age discrimination was added, and in '73 disability. ADA was introduced in 1990, and that was expanded further in 2008. So now, for example, a business is required to make reasonable accommodations for a disability. But they don't have to hire you if you scream obscenities, or wear yellow shirts, or I dunno, are vocally planning to murder a politician or destroy a Government. None of those are protected classes. No requirement to do business with them or to hire them, or to keep them in your employ.
Re: Parler drops offline after Amazon pulls support
#973I'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…
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…
I don't think it's anything new. People used to call political activists' house to make death threats. It's a recurring theme in Selma, the movie about Dr. King.
I never had to deal with this as a community moderator, but these sort of virtue spirals can destroy communities if they're not nipped in the bud.
Re: Parler drops offline after Amazon pulls support
#974I'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…
If AWS is dropping you, then Facebook, Twitter, and Google probably already have. Stripe, Cloudflare, and Paypal are probably doing the same. If you try to continue, Visa, MasterCard, and your ISP will shut you down next. This is the world we live in now. You can be removed from commerce by a unanimous decision that you will be told never happened. I am just glad I can shut people down hard now when they say, "If you…
This is happening to normal folks with small businesses too. I have some friends who are being targeted by google and fb, for no good reason as they’re completely in the dark. We need to decentralize the web yesterday.
Re: Parler drops offline after Amazon pulls support
#975Earlier quoted context omitted.
Was the parler content legal? "Amazon Web Services suspended Parler from its web hosting services... citing a letter it had obtained that mentions 98 examples of Parler posts that "encourage and incite violence." Don't forget that Amazon also has legal liability for hosting and distributing illegal content. Amazon is not a monopoly -- the mitigation for AWS being able to cut off your business is to architect your app…
"legal" in a democracy is something that only a court can decide. I don't know what was Parler's size, but in any website with millions of visitors a handful will post aweful things each day. Were those 98 posts posted by the same user? Did anyone report them and Parler refused to take them down? Were they popular or downvoted with few views?
There is already a precedent from decades ago. The U.S. and pretty much every developed country on Earth have laws against distributing and possessing child pornography, because child pornography creates a market for exploiting children and selling the recordings online. The universal consensus is that this kind of expression needs to be restricted in the strictest possible terms, because it causes material harm to disadvantaged people. Nobody loud enough to be picked up in the media bats an eye at this reasoning for sanitizing the open Internet of such content, and online the words "illegal content" have become more or less synonymous with child pornography. Researchers looking into the subject to study its actual effects have been ostracized themselves because it's so hated. Its illegality has entered the realm of common sense at this point. So maybe there exists some extreme in terms of what you can post online such that if you disagree and insist that a certain class of content needs a platform because of reasons relating to "free speech," you will be almost universally disagreed with and vehemently ostracized. That's why the deplatforming doesn't surprise me much.
But determining what counts as inciting violence is harder to determine. You can't post images of children that were actually exploited and later declare with plausible deniability that the content of those images were not to be taken seriously, because they act as photographic evidence of a crime. But how many people that post online about hanging a politician would really act on those words if the politician was within arm's reach?
It's another question as to whether or not child pornography incites child exploitation, instead of just incentivizing it, similar to the argument that pornography incites rape. But it seems to be agreed on that humanity would be better off without it entirely, to the point of very harsh legislation. I'm wondering if this is the direction some people would want to take the spreading of misinformation and alleged incitement. I wonder how many people who distribute child pornography would change their outlook on it in the face of evidence.
Re: Parler drops offline after Amazon pulls support
#976Earlier quoted context omitted.
100% agree - but I think this can only be solved via legislation. Amazon has too much market power if it can shut down another company at the push of a button for something that isn't illegal (even if it's distasteful).
Was the parler content legal? "Amazon Web Services suspended Parler from its web hosting services... citing a letter it had obtained that mentions 98 examples of Parler posts that "encourage and incite violence." Don't forget that Amazon also has legal liability for hosting and distributing illegal content. Amazon is not a monopoly -- the mitigation for AWS being able to cut off your business is to architect your app…
> Was the parler content legal?
Yes, unless there is a court judgement I missed. Everyone is innocent until proven guilty in a court of the land.
Re: Parler drops offline after Amazon pulls support
#977Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you provide (or estimate) numbers on that? And also, what is the threshold for deciding which platform is on one side or another?
The threshold is if the management at Amazon etc. feel that it would generate too much bad publicity and/or potential legal liability for them to provide service to an organization mired in such controversy.
That’s a perfectly reasonable reason for a business to do something.
Re: Parler drops offline after Amazon pulls support
#978I don't know which social media platforms use AWS to any critical extent, but I can't imagine them ejecting a big name like Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, etc over "finding dozens of posts on the service which it said encouraged violence".
It's the clear double standard that makes this concerning.
I think you have to read the standard as: did this lead to violence? If you do, it doesn’t seem like a double standard anymore.
Re: Parler drops offline after Amazon pulls support
#979Earlier quoted context omitted.
I find the "overnight" more shocking than terminating a contract. That they would be so callous toward a customer should make anyone think twice before signing up.
I find it highly unlikely that they didn’t have conversations beforehand. It’s also really black and white - they were proud of their lack of moderation and said it publicly. It’s not like there was a misunderstanding. Plus an org like Parler has its own lawyers. There is no way they weren’t warned of their contractual obligations by their own counsel. They just chose to take that risk.
I wasn't under the table but Parler's CEO claims there was no prior notice.
Re: Parler drops offline after Amazon pulls support
#980I am also quesitioning if shutting down Parler servers is a pure business decision.
90% of Americans don't know what AWS servers are so I don't think they would care
if AWS kept running them or not.
On the other site 70 millions Trump voters will certainly take notice.
I am one of them and a big fan of AWS but I am going to redirect my buying
to other online companies as much as possible.