Judge refuses to reinstate Parler after Amazon shut it down • Hacker News Board

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

#541

Post by isaiahg » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 9:08 AM UTC

ed25519FUUU wrote: post #181

sparrish wrote: post #23

Amazon has a right to associate (or not associate) with whomever they want. This is a fundamental principle of freedom - something Parler should know, understand, and espouse. Why are they fighting? They should be applauding.

This is true with one important exception: you can not refuse business on the basis of race, color, religion or national origin. Refusing business based on political ideology is not only allowed but seems to be encouraged!

If you read the letter amazon sent they were very clear this wasn't about politics. There were posts advocating killing in the form of execution, beheadings, and burnings. Hard to imagine any company wants to be associated with that kind of thing.

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

#542

Post by mjburgess » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 9:17 AM UTC

crooked-v wrote: post #41

minikites wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Free market for thee, but not for me.

> Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: there must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect. https://crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/liberals-against-progre...

It is propagandistic to call that "conservatism". It's commonly called, "tribalism".

And yes, healthy politics is conducted on the basis that human societies are tribal. Democracy is just the "accounting system" for competing tribal concerns.

Universalism, "classical liberalism", etc. is an occasional side effect of "healthy tribalism". It cannot be a political goal, because there are genuine contradictions in the preferences of various groups -- and they cannot be all jointly-realised.

Faux-universalism fails to acknowledge this an ends up preferencing the "natural" distribution of resources, ie., that arising from the most powerful groups (taking, competing) with the weaksest.

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

#543

Post by user-the-name » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 9:59 AM UTC

Consultant32452 wrote: post #381

DonHopkins wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Parler had some pretty strict moderation enforcement against progressive views, just not against racism, death threats, and successfully planning violent insurrections against the government. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/01/filing-amazon-wa... Filing: Amazon warned Parler for months about “more than 100” violent threats [...] Amazon provided "more than 100 additional representative pieces of content" advo…

I addressed those claims in my last paragraph.

If by "addressed" you mean "mentioned and ignored", then yes.

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

#544

Post by visarga » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 10:13 AM UTC

chevill wrote: post #510

Consultant32452 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a big part of this is accepting Amazon's claims as fact, which I would not. For example, Amazon claims Parler was not moderating when in fact Parler had some pretty strict moderation enforcement. One could make an argument of whether or not it was successful "enough" and you'd have to compare it to other industry leaders like Facebook and Twitter which both have copious amounts of child pornography, calls for…

The document states that Parler agreed they had a massive backlog of reported content to review that "potentially promoted violence". Even Parler isn't making the claim here that they were doing a good job of moderating. They are arguing that it was a breach of contract not to give them more time to fix it. There's plenty of reason to be skeptical about lots of things. There's plenty of reasons to dislike mainstream…

> it was a breach of contract not to give them more time to fix it

spoken as if there is just one cloud hosting provider in the world; it's parlers job to take care of their own security and resilience

Let's say I call Jim's taxi every day, I am his client, and one day Jim refuses to serve me, can I sue him or should I just call another taxi?

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

#545

Post by glangdale » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 10:21 AM UTC

crooked-v wrote: post #41

minikites wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Free market for thee, but not for me.

> Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: there must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect. https://crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/liberals-against-progre...

This is certainly true of modern "Trumpian" conservatism. I think it's possible to imagine a cautious centre-right conservative for whom this characterization does not hold (a la Buckley's quote "A conservative is someone who stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.")

I'm not either kind of conservative myself, but I'd much rather deal with the old-school variety, who at their best represent a reasonable chunk of society.

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

#546

Post by ThomPete » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 10:24 AM UTC

watwut wrote: post #528

goatinaboat wrote: post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if Twitter is under the standard TOS, they’ll be subject to the same reactive enforcement and quick cancellation as anyone els Twitter literally provides a soapbox for the leadership of Iran to call for the total destruction of Israel. It provided the platform for organising the summer of rioting the US has just seen. AWS cancelling Parler is purely about domestic US politics.

> It provided the platform for organising the summer of rioting the US has just seen. Twitter was literally closing accounts and deleting tweets that called for violence during that summer. There was quite a lot of complaining where twitter done it in ambiguous situations. Twitter was not perfect. But twitter was definitely at least trying. Twitter would not had issue to delete clear calls for violence that Amazon wo…

there are still plenty of tweets that havent been deleted.

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

#547

Post by chalst » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 10:30 AM UTC

roenxi wrote: post #537

ardy42 wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I really, genuinely, truly don't understand why people insist on understanding this only in the context of partisan censorship. It's motivated reasoning. It's how you can get to the conclusion that Amazon cutting ties with Parler is unacceptable. I don't necessarily think all people who follow this line came up with it spontaneously. I'm sure there's a lot of propaganda to this effect swirling in conservative media…

It isn't motivated reasoning, it is profound scepticism around how Amazon could have (1) identified the risk Parler was breaching their TOS (2) confirmed their suspicious and (3) ejected them from AWS in the time-frame that actually happened. Parler seems to have been caught completely unaware that there was a risk of AWS cancelling their service, so presumably there wasn't any serious attempt by Amazon to seek corre…

AWS drew attention to the violation of the TOS in mid November and provided extensive documentation of the kind of content they regarded as unacceptable in mid December [1]. You seem unaware of the most basic facts of the case.

1: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/01/filing-amazon-wa...

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

#548

Post by evgen » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 10:40 AM UTC

ceejayoz wrote: post #243

throwaway45349 wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The deplatforming has been going on for years, since at least 2016 when Trump was elected in the first place. In Twitter's case[0] they went after smaller users (edgy "russian bots") until ~2018, when they really ramped things up. This even hit left wing (anti-establishment) activists[1]. One of the conclusions of a recent purge by Reddit was that it just pushed the banned users into even more radical spaces online[2…

> One of the conclusions of a recent purge by Reddit was that it just pushed the banned users into even more radical spaces online[2]. You should re-read it. It offers that as a possibility , with terms like "may" and "could have". It does not conclude it did happen; it notes that some users migrated, but that's not at all surprising. The hardcore folks are likely to always wind up somewhere, but driving them off Red…

Actually, there is a lot of weak evidence out there that de-platforming actually worked as intended. It did push some users to more radical spaces, but it also made it very difficult for weakly-interested users to be pushed into the space and become further radicalized. When 'the algorithm' can no longer suggest a slightly more radical version of the content you are currently viewing because that version has been de-platformed then it seems we start to see the norm drift back towards center rather than being pushed further to an extreme.

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

#549

Post by user-the-name » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 10:41 AM UTC

echelon wrote: post #186

duskwuff wrote: post #175

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.

You're not anti-fascist if you're sitting here trying to defend the fascists.

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

#550

Post by user-the-name » Fri, Jan 22, 2021, 10:44 AM UTC

ravenstine wrote: post #370

duskwuff wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Moderation scales with the size of the site. Obviously a tiny little web forum with a few dozen users isn't expected to have a Twitter-sized moderation team -- but if you're at a few million users and growing fast, you're expected to have some plans in place.

That sounds good on paper, but what happens when your revenue doesn't closely correlate with the number of users? Hypothetically, a site can have a million users but have a shoestring budget. On the other side of the scale, Twitter not only has the support structure to mass moderate but they have investors providing millions of dollars. Hiring a full time moderator isn't trivial; it's thousands a year per person, whi…

> but what happens when your revenue doesn't closely correlate with the number of users?

Then you're fucked, because you overextended past your available resources, and you crash and burn.