Parler’s de-platforming shows the exceptional power of cloud providers • Hacker News Board

Re: Parler’s de-platforming shows the exceptional power of cloud providers

#471

Post by enraged_camel » Tue, Jan 19, 2021, 1:11 AM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #430

enraged_camel wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an obviously impossible burden to load on someone, and I think you know that. If democracy is legitimately lost in America, it will happen via a series of events that we today cannot conceive of. It is more useful to think events like the Capitol incident as causing long-lasting damage to democracy, and there is a non-negligible possibility that societal schisms will widen, as opposed to heal. What that will…

> t is more useful to think events like the Capitol incident as causing long-lasting damage to democracy, and there is a non-negligible possibility that societal schisms will widen, as opposed to heal. What that will look like in the future is anybody's guess. What are you willing to give up politically to heal societal schisms?

What is the argument you're trying to make?

Re: Parler’s de-platforming shows the exceptional power of cloud providers

#472

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Jan 19, 2021, 1:12 AM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #419

lisper wrote: post #11

I gotta say, recent events have left me shaken to my core. I thought I believed in free speech, to the point where I started a company dedicated to providing privacy and communications products that were not subject to control by any central authority (that turns out to be very hard!) But watching the events of the past few years unfold I am no longer convinced that this would really make the world a better place. I…

I think you're misidentifying the problem as being about modern technology for speech. It's not. Trump could have done the same exact thing in the day of fireside chats. A lot of what drove Trump's rise isn't Parler (which didn't even exist in 2018) but talk radio. The problem is that American is a diverse county of 330 million people who hate each other, and we're too idealistic to engage in the sort of social frict…

[deleted]

Re: Parler’s de-platforming shows the exceptional power of cloud providers

#473

Post by compiler-guy » Tue, Jan 19, 2021, 1:13 AM UTC

jessedhillon wrote: post #456

jldugger wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People marched into the capitol with handguns, zip ties, and an intent to award the presidency to the loser. I'm not waiting for someone to actually succeed before I declare them insurrectionists, and I don't know why you want to minimize the threats made against Congress, which did not stop that day: https://lawandcrime.com/u-s-capitol-siege/no-bail-for-qanon-... If you want to compare it to something, I would recom…

> an intent to award the presidency to the loser How would they have done that? Nobody would listen to a bunch of hooligans pronouncing orders from the House rostrum. In a coup, someone like a general is waiting to hear the signal to throw in with the coup leaders, providing actual institutional power to the usurpers. There was no institutional power behind these people -- do you think some general at Andrews was wai…

Their intent to intimidate the lawmakers into leaving Trump in power. Trump absolutely wanted them to do so, and was very strategic in staying just on one side of the line.

They didn't need a general waiting in the wings, they just needed the President who was already sitting in the WhiteHouse.

Re: Parler’s de-platforming shows the exceptional power of cloud providers

#474

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Jan 19, 2021, 1:13 AM UTC

slg wrote: post #438

smsm42 wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The very foundation of your democracy has been eroded. That would be a crappy democracy if it could be eroded by a bunch of idiots taking an unauthorized Whitehouse tour. Fortunately, absolutely nothing happened to the democracy and it proceeded on its course. What could actually erode the democracy is nation giving up on free speech. That'd be a real sign of nation in severe distress. > I don't listen to your news…

I can't believe this needs to be said, but the fact it failed doesn't mean the danger wasn't real. Some members of the mob were actively looking to kill the people who were 2nd and 3rd in line for the presidency. Let's not pretend that there was zero danger to democracy.

[deleted]

Re: Parler’s de-platforming shows the exceptional power of cloud providers

#475

Post by PeterisP » Tue, Jan 19, 2021, 1:13 AM UTC

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #269

NationalPark wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your position is genuinely that you believe website operators should be mandated by law to host content they do not want to host except when that content has been specifically determined to be illegal, then we simply disagree on that point - I think that would make the world a worse place and I prefer the world where that rule is not in effect. But if you believe in allowing the tiniest ounce of operator discretio…

> " If your position is genuinely that you believe website operators should be mandated by law to host content they do not want to host except when that content has been specifically determined to be illegal, then we simply disagree on that point. " That's another meme I see repeated a lot. If we go back before 1950, the same argument you are making was used justify businesses refusing to provide service to women, mi…

It is in fact interesting as that's one of key differences between the anti-discrimination laws of different countries.

USA in general considers gender, religion, color, national origin, race, and age as protected characteristics, but permits discrimination on political beliefs - but some jurisdictions in USA do have such a prohibition (e.g. DC - https://ohr.dc.gov/protectedtraits). Some provinces of Canada prohibit such discrimination (in e.g. employment) but some don't. As another example, German constitution at the very beginning (Article 3, https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_gg/englisch_gg.h...) asserts anti-discrimination for, among other things, political opinion.

Universal Declaration of Human Rights Article 2 asserts that these rights shall apply " without distinction of [...] political or other opinion", and European Convention of Human Rights Article 14 explicitly prohibits discrimination based on "political or other opinions", which has also been applied by European Court of Human Rights in e.g. Redfearn v United Kindgom [2012] ECHR 1878.

That would forbid (for example) employers to fire people just because they were active members of Proud Boys or Antifa or the Communist party or KKK or whatever. However, IMHO this would not prohibit practical censorship of political opinions (free speech is not a core human right in either of these two declarations), it would still allow platforms to set rules for messages on their platform and kick out people who violate these rules - it would just disallow them to kick out people for having a political affiliation that they're expressing outside of that platform, but that's not what was happening here.

Re: Parler’s de-platforming shows the exceptional power of cloud providers

#476

Post by ceejayoz » Tue, Jan 19, 2021, 1:13 AM UTC

jessedhillon wrote: post #456

jldugger wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People marched into the capitol with handguns, zip ties, and an intent to award the presidency to the loser. I'm not waiting for someone to actually succeed before I declare them insurrectionists, and I don't know why you want to minimize the threats made against Congress, which did not stop that day: https://lawandcrime.com/u-s-capitol-siege/no-bail-for-qanon-... If you want to compare it to something, I would recom…

> an intent to award the presidency to the loser How would they have done that? Nobody would listen to a bunch of hooligans pronouncing orders from the House rostrum. In a coup, someone like a general is waiting to hear the signal to throw in with the coup leaders, providing actual institutional power to the usurpers. There was no institutional power behind these people -- do you think some general at Andrews was wai…

> How would they have done that?

Attempted murder is still a felony, even if's a very dumb attempt. The same is true for coups.

> In a coup, someone like a general is waiting to hear the signal to throw in with the coup leaders, providing actual institutional power to the usurpers.

The Q folks think this is exactly what the military is going to do.

Re: Parler’s de-platforming shows the exceptional power of cloud providers

#477

Post by mdoms » Tue, Jan 19, 2021, 1:14 AM UTC

antibuddy wrote: post #128

lisper wrote: post #11

I gotta say, recent events have left me shaken to my core. I thought I believed in free speech, to the point where I started a company dedicated to providing privacy and communications products that were not subject to control by any central authority (that turns out to be very hard!) But watching the events of the past few years unfold I am no longer convinced that this would really make the world a better place. I…

My first instinct is to think, that you never believed in free speech in the first place, however I'd like to hear some examples of what shook you to the core.

I imagine he's referring to right wing extremists storming the capitol building to overthrow a democratically elected leader and imprison and perhaps murder members of the house of representatives. Just a thought.

Re: Parler’s de-platforming shows the exceptional power of cloud providers

#478

Post by sdenton4 » Tue, Jan 19, 2021, 1:14 AM UTC

smsm42 wrote: post #432

Lazare wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with almost everything you say except... > a bunch of talking heads on TV and Twitter that told them there was an "insurrection" (nothing of the sort happened of course) It didn't succeed, and in retrospect, it didn't look very effective. Many (but by no means all) of the participants were clowns. However, it was absolutely an attempt. People died in an attempt to storm a seat of government and install a diff…

> However, it was absolutely an attempt Attempt at what? Takeover of the power in the US? B-u-l-l-s-h-i-t. > People were chanting "hang Mike Pence", People chant a lot of shit. People were chanting "hang Trump" for four years, nobody ever called it an insurrection. Before that, they were chanting against Obama, Bush, Clinton, etc. Nobody ever has been hanged. Pretending not to understand the difference between chanti…

Well, /someone/ had an explicit plan for using a delay of the congressional certification to overturn the results:

'Giuliani tells Tuberville that McConnell wants to narrow the objections to just three states and explains that the Trump team wants to object to 10. “So if you could object to every state and, along with a congressman, get a hearing for every state, I know we would delay you a lot, but it would give us the opportunity to get the legislators who are very, very close to pulling their vote, particularly after what McConnell did today.”'

https://thedispatch.com/p/giuliani-to-senator-try-to-just-sl...

It's not a huge leap to imagine a deadlock on certification leading to Trump declaring he'd just hold on to the presidency. That's basically been the whole game plan for months.

Re: Parler’s de-platforming shows the exceptional power of cloud providers

#479

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Jan 19, 2021, 1:15 AM UTC

acdha wrote: post #441

trident5000 wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes the secret service made the call to take the president into a bunker because it never happened. Just wanted a little adventure that day.

Whoever made decision to move him into the bunker doesn’t change the fact that the protesters did not go past the gates or otherwise do anything which was unusual from decades of protests – which happen all of the time in DC. You are clearly desperate to portray a false equivalence but that simply doesn’t fit the facts.

[deleted]

Re: Parler’s de-platforming shows the exceptional power of cloud providers

#480

Post by throwaway894345 » Tue, Jan 19, 2021, 1:15 AM UTC

slg wrote: post #438

smsm42 wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The very foundation of your democracy has been eroded. That would be a crappy democracy if it could be eroded by a bunch of idiots taking an unauthorized Whitehouse tour. Fortunately, absolutely nothing happened to the democracy and it proceeded on its course. What could actually erode the democracy is nation giving up on free speech. That'd be a real sign of nation in severe distress. > I don't listen to your news…

I can't believe this needs to be said, but the fact it failed doesn't mean the danger wasn't real. Some members of the mob were actively looking to kill the people who were 2nd and 3rd in line for the presidency. Let's not pretend that there was zero danger to democracy.

> I can't believe this needs to be said, but the fact it failed doesn't mean the danger wasn't real.

The danger is unreal not because it failed, but because it was obviously going to fail. We're talking about a bunch of delusional LARPers. If some foreign intelligence unit tries and fails to overthrow your country's government, that's insurrection. If it's the doofus who stole the podium or the guy with face paint and a horned fur hat, not so much.

Note that the factual crimes are already plenty bad--they don't need to be exaggerated.

> Some members of the mob were actively looking to kill the people who were 2nd and 3rd in line for the presidency

There were murderers and arsonists at BLM riots as well; that doesn't impugn the legitimate protesters. Similarly, these few actual insurrectionists don't make the MAGA trespassers, rioters, even murderers into insurrectionists.

> Let's not pretend that there was zero danger to democracy.

There is a danger to our democracy in that a sitting president undermining democracy by spreading lies about election fraud. More generally, the media and tech companies are deliberately cultivating division and mistrust among the American people. These are real, credible dangers to democracy. The MAGA LARPers were not a credible threat to our democracy.