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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

#511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> is Valve also claiming liability protection under section 230 as a information service provider? What part of Section 230 do you think had any bearing on the issue being discussed?

Section 230 is a valuable grant of liability protection, and thus morally obligates platforms to act as a public forum. At the very least, moderation decisions should be written down and reviewable by a third party. The law should be reformed to reflect that.

> Section 230 is a valuable grant of liability protection, and thus morally obligates platforms to act as a public forum.

That makes no sense, since the entire, explicit purpose of Section 230 was to free platforms from preexisting disincentives si that they could be free to “restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected” without incurring liability that would otherwise attend such editorial control.

You are literally suggesting that the price of Section 230 protection ought to be not doing the things to which Section 230 protection applies in the first place.

Also, I think it's wrong, in any cases, to think of Section 230 as a special grant of liability protection, any more than the preexisting different liability of distributors from that of publishers is a special grant. It's a recognition that online media enables models that would not be practical with the media for which the traditional liability roles for content developed, and that venues for content which wasn't pre-screened in detail but over which largely reactive editorial control was exercised was all of technically and economically practical on the internet, inconsistent with the premises of the classic publisher vs. distributor liability analysis, and already, at the time the Act was considered, starting to be stifled by application of the traditional publisher vs. distributor rules. We don't force bookstores to be neutral platforms to be free of publisher liability, because we recognize that bookstores aren't naturally going to be pre-screening content at the detailed level print publishers will, and it doesn't make sense to stifle them by forcing them to. 230 is the same idea, just for a business activity that didn't exist when the common law of liability was evolving.

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

#512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IANAL and I'm not saying I disagree with your conclusion, but I do think the case is more interesting than just AWS booting a malicious customer (with regards to their TOS). > there's the fact that AWS doesn't host Twitter's feed This is funny (as in, LOL funny) to point out because it makes parler seem completely inept, but it's only technically correct. They just negotiated a fat contract to host twitter, and that'…

AWS also a a very large contract with another Twitter competitor: Pinterest

In what way is Pinterest a Twitter competitor?

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

#513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plenty of people have posted similar or worse things on Twitter without moderation by Twitter or much shame to Twitter's upstream service providers. Also, can you draw a direct causal line between AWS hosted Parler posts and actual violence that took place on Jan 6th?

Probably†, but they don't have to. AWS's AUP sets the bar for what is or isn't acceptable on AWS, and AWS has 64 pages of Parler posts that contravened that AUP, many of which AWS warned Parler about and got no response. † We'll all know soon enough, since Parler got dumped by a trivial IDOR vulnerability almost the moment AWS gave them notice they were going to be taken offline .

Yes, but apparently the work of drawing causal inference is unneeded because the judge already assumed it in her ruling, perhaps using her amazing oracular or exploit powers.

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

#514
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…

IANAL and I'm not saying I disagree with your conclusion, but I do think the case is more interesting than just AWS booting a malicious customer (with regards to their TOS). > there's the fact that AWS doesn't host Twitter's feed This is funny (as in, LOL funny) to point out because it makes parler seem completely inept, but it's only technically correct. They just negotiated a fat contract to host twitter, and that'…

I don't think it's so unreasonable to take the existence of that contract as evidence that AWS reviewed twitter's content and deemed it acceptable content.

Twitter content isn't on AWS now though, and there's no way to know what Twitter has agreed to remove in the move over to AWS, so essentially this argument says that Parler should be allowed to stay on AWS because it's possible that AWS might host similar content in the future. That argument obviously doesn't work. A business can't be judged on what might happen in the future.

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

#515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Taking a government grant of liability protection should come with obligations to the public. Why? That's a serious question. The reason liability protections exist for information services is because information services can't exist without them. It's not possible for an information service provider to be strictly liable for what their users post while having anything like a reasonable quality of service or cost.…

"Requiring strict liability..." which is why I did not write that. I would propose that moderation decisions be logged and reviewable on demand (at the plantiff's cost) in front of a reputable arbitrator of the platform's choice.

Is that even possible at any sort of scale?

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

#516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Facebook and Twitter spend a cubic fuckton of money on moderation, at a scale significant enough that there are, annually, news cycles about the psychic toll Facebook moderation takes on the army of people Facebook pays to do it. Which appears to be less effective -- paid moderators aren't members of individual communities -- with the result that most of the planning of the riot happened on Facebook. > Parler hoped…

Reddit bans whole subs when they get too out of hand to moderate, while Parler effectively is one of those banned subs. Amazon presented a record of months of complaints about specific pieces of violent content on Parler, to which Parler not only didn't respond, but in fact waved off by saying they had a backlog of tens of thousands of similar pieces of content. Reddit would have killed the toxic sub and been done wi…

> Amazon presented a record of months of complaints about specific pieces of violent content on Parler, to which Parler not only didn't respond, but in fact waved off by saying they had a backlog of tens of thousands of similar pieces of content.

They were adding six digit numbers of users a day. Was a temporary backlog that unreasonable?

> Reddit bans whole subs when they get too out of hand to moderate, while Parler effectively is one of those banned subs.

Reddit (per Wikipedia) has 330 million users and 138,000 subs. Parler had 10 million users, equivalent to more than 4000 subs, not one.

And I think that's the root of it. "Nuke from orbit" against something that had the capacity to be saved through measures dramatically less drastic than that.

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

#517
post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Peruse https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/parlers-new-serverless-ar... Unless you are building your webservice like it's 1998 (And webservices in 1998 sucked ), you can't really disentangle from hosted solutions.

Sure you can, and lots of people do.

Agreed, I would wager that this is where a good majority of startups begin until they take a good stock of the situation at hand.

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

#518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> he was saying that their tech rep at Amazon gave no hints that they were in danger of being shut down And I wouldn't expect them to do so! They're a tech rep, not a legal rep.

So deplatforming by surprise is okay? Facebook and Twitter don't own their data centers. If the DCs responded to the same pressure about hosting illegal content, the social media giants would disappear too. Edit: the downvotes and rate limits are about to push me away from HN for good. This is ridiculous. My platform is anti-fascism. I'm tired of people on both sides trying to shut down the other side.

This tired argument that Parler is an innocent victim of censorship is so invalid (by so much data) that it seems like a false flag. The moderation of Parler was designed to tailor to one viewpoint: Trumpism. It was an engineering echo chamber for a narrow set of ideologies and naked hate.

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

#519
post #276
post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When did half the population have their speech banned?

The whole argument is so silly. Trump could snap a finger and have cameras ready to air on national TV whatever he wanted to say. If Valve bans me from Steam for my language is that also violation of my free speech or is it their right to protect their platform?

Worth noting that Valve is one of the few companies that makes a conscious effort in favor of freedom of speech. They refuse to moderate for ideological reasons and not just cost.

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

#520
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…

This case is likely going to be more hairy than AWS wants it to be.
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