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Judge refuses to reinstate Parler after Amazon shut it down

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Re: Judge refuses to reinstate Parler after Amazon shut it down

#251

Post by tptacek »

throwaway45349 wrote: post #107
tptacek wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The premise of Parler directly contravenes the AWS AUP, which demands that companies ensure their users comply with AWS's AUP and that companies kick users that don't. The whole point of Parler is to host Twitter users who violate Twitter's TOS, which is a cohort significantly comprised of people who are also violating AWS's TOS. To believe that Parler would have been viable on AWS to begin with, they had to actively…

I get it, companies do not legally have to provide these services to right-wing groups persecuted off of Twitter. I'm saying that it's _morally_ wrong to deplatform. Not necessarily because I enjoy having this speech hosted, but because isolating and pushing out so called "deplorables" is escalating the current American political conflicts to serious violence. As I said in my other comment, when the disenfranchised c…

This is spawning a lengthy subthread but because you asked me, just for the record, I don't care about the competing moral claims. I'm just interested in what the law says here. The moral stuff never seems to converge to any kind of real insight on HN, but the legal stuff has a right and a wrong answer that we can hope to reach by debating it.

Re: Judge refuses to reinstate Parler after Amazon shut it down

#252

Post by fjabre »

betterunix2 wrote: post #183
fjabre wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is false. The left now has the Senate and the Presidency. The electoral college does not matter. They go the way their states go as was made quite clear in the last election. EDIT: Of course it matters how the voting system was designed. The EC votes the way their State votes. The forefathers intended for states to have some say in the matter. We are a representative democracy. That is how the system was designe…

The electoral college absolutely does matter and absolutely does favor right wing politicians (for now). Every state gets a minimum of three electoral votes regardless of their population, so as a result, a single vote in a sparsely populated state like Wyoming has up to four times the influence that a single vote in a densely populated state like NJ has. The current political make-up of the country is such that righ…

Reality is that the Dems own the entire congress and the presidency right now.

Reality is we are representative democracy. The forefathers deliberately designed it that way.

Reality must line up with your arguments. It does not.

If what you say is true, Trump would most likely be president right now.

Dems own entire cities with the largest population centers. Dems have better organized grassroots. Dems have California and New York, the main stream media.

What advantages you speak of are moot compared to those ones.

We are a representative democracy and we always have been.

Re: Judge refuses to reinstate Parler after Amazon shut it down

#253

Post by WJW »

duskwuff wrote: post #225
michaelmior wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know effectively zero about Parler's infrastructure, but I would say it's not that uncommon to build a product tied specifically to AWS. What really surprised me though is that it took them days to get even a static homepage up.

My understanding is that Parler actively avoided making technical decisions which would tie them to AWS. Their problems coming back online have primarily been because most major hosting providers have refused to take their business (and possibly also as a result of their ridiculous hardware requirements, cf. https://twitter.com/th3j35t3r/status/1350612426115452935 ).

Those are... rather onerous HW requirements. Do you really need 20k cores to run a small-medium size social network? Asking because I have personal running a 40-50 million monthly users file sharing site on less than a tenth of that and most of it was done with Rails (itself not the most minimalist of frameworks).

Re: Judge refuses to reinstate Parler after Amazon shut it down

#254

Post by fjabre »

triceratops wrote: post #128
fjabre wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is false. The left now has the Senate and the Presidency. The electoral college does not matter. They go the way their states go as was made quite clear in the last election. EDIT: Of course it matters how the voting system was designed. The EC votes the way their State votes. The forefathers intended for states to have some say in the matter. We are a representative democracy. That is how the system was designe…

> The left now has the Senate and the Presidency. The key term is "now". After getting about 40m more votes. Be honest. Is that balanced?

Was just pointing out it's quite clear that the nation itself is left leaning. That's honest by the numbers.

To say the Republicans have any kind of advantage right now except for maybe the courts is incorrect.

Re: Judge refuses to reinstate Parler after Amazon shut it down

#255

Post by gowld »

snoshy wrote: post #25
tptacek wrote: post #2

Here's the denial of the TRO: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qhXD-4Kaw5dCEBv0dUM8buygEKg... Parler hasn't lost the case, just a TRO that demands reinstatement on AWS, but the ruling on the TRO requires the judge to tip their hand about the case, and Parler is going to lose. I don't think you even need to read the AWS AUP to know that Parler has no real case here. To buy Parler's contract claim, you'd have to believ…

It seemed apparent right when the case was filed that Parler didn't have a leg to stand on. It was partly a play for publicity that plays well into their customer demographics, and a dying gasp of trying to seek some kind of injunctive help from the administration, no matter how impossible it seemed. Judging by how weak their infrastructure was in the first place, getting any kind of resilient hosting in place after…

Surely there is a Russian cloud provider?

Parler is a Russian company so it should be easy to sign up with local providers.

Re: Judge refuses to reinstate Parler after Amazon shut it down

#256

Post by fjabre »

xxpor wrote: post #132
fjabre wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is false. The left now has the Senate and the Presidency. The electoral college does not matter. They go the way their states go as was made quite clear in the last election. EDIT: Of course it matters how the voting system was designed. The EC votes the way their State votes. The forefathers intended for states to have some say in the matter. We are a representative democracy. That is how the system was designe…

You can not seriously argue the EC doesn't matter when the republicans have won the popular vote once since 1988 yet have held the presidency for 3 terms.

It's just a bunch of State puppets who do the State's bidding in almost all cases.

Each state gets numbers by its population. Great. Forefathers intended it this way. I think that's fair.

It stops a giant mob from overpowering the system. Unless you take over the Post office and use it as a voting system, which dems clearly did here.

I don't think a direct democracy would work in the US. I like representative democracies.

Re: Judge refuses to reinstate Parler after Amazon shut it down

#257

Post by umvi »

vlunkr wrote: post #102
unethical_ban wrote: post #3

I've been trying to come to grips with the societal impact of echo chambers, "hate" speech, and the obligations vs. rights of sites and hosting providers. So far, my take is that websites have less obligation than hosting. It concerns me that AWS booted a site off their platform for speech issues - I am leaning more and more to the idea that colos, IaaS and ISPs should be considered common carriers, and that only a c…

I worked for a very small hosting company and we had to automatically detect and remove bitcoin miners because they were so common, I can't even imagine what AWS deals with. If AWS had to get a court order every time someone tried to do something illegal, or against TOS on their platform, the courts would be flooded immediately.

> I worked for a very small hosting company and we had to automatically detect and remove bitcoin miners because they were so common, I can't even imagine what AWS deals with.

Huh? Why shouldn't I be able to mine bitcoins on AWS? What's the point of paying to use people's computers if I can't use them for what I want? I pay AWS because I have money and they have servers and I want to pay them money in exchange for using their servers. So if I put a bitcoin miner on there running 24/7, I might rack up a huge bill, but why should Amazon care as long as I have the cash?

I'm opposed to the idea that server usage should be morally vetted by the server owner. If something illegal is happening, by all means take it down, but "what you are doing is legal, but we disagree with it so bye bye" is a bad precedent, IMO.

Re: Judge refuses to reinstate Parler after Amazon shut it down

#258

Post by tantalor »

unethical_ban wrote: post #3

I've been trying to come to grips with the societal impact of echo chambers, "hate" speech, and the obligations vs. rights of sites and hosting providers. So far, my take is that websites have less obligation than hosting. It concerns me that AWS booted a site off their platform for speech issues - I am leaning more and more to the idea that colos, IaaS and ISPs should be considered common carriers, and that only a c…

> speech issues

When your service is providing a platform for speech, what other issues can there be?

Re: Judge refuses to reinstate Parler after Amazon shut it down

#259

Post by jcranmer »

jariel wrote: post #231
SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does it mean, concretely, to "wake up" to this realization? I certainly acknowledge that Amazon might make bad content moderation decisions in the future, and if they do I'll speak out against those decisions. I just don't follow why I'd need to do something about that today.

Because the insurrection on capitol hill provides the cover of legitimacy for people to act in a manner that also may be very inconsistent and politicized. Jeff Bezos owns news publications, he has a worldview and likes to flaunt it to some extent, moreover, these systems are prone to the possibility of arbitrary, and often political decisions. Note that historically, rich dudes bought newspapers to attack their poli…

> Literally Emamnuel Macron and Angela Merkel have spoken out about the arbitrary 'banning' of groups and individuals, and because there is an 'imminent consideration over here in the US' doesn't abnegate our broader concerns about arbitrary banning.

This is somewhat amusing to me, as Germany is a country that bans neo-Nazi political parties and makes Holocaust denial a federal crime, whereas both actions are seen as violations of constitutionally-protected free speech in the US.

The concern, I suspect, is more over the scope of power that private broadcast platforms have, to which my retort is to ask what their antitrust regulators have been doing for the past decade.

Re: Judge refuses to reinstate Parler after Amazon shut it down

#260

Post by jcranmer »

guerrilla wrote: post #83

Just one question I haven't seen answered: In what way are they supposedly a competitor of Amazon?

They're not. They're a competitor to Twitter, and they're claiming (or attempting to, at least) that Amazon colluded with Twitter to keep them out of the market.
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