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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

#11

As much as I don't like Parler's digital death sentence from Silicon Valley, they should've known this was coming and prepared. It doesn't take a genius to know that such a controversial website is going to get dropped, even if it's just because it makes the webhost look bad. Yes it's unfair that Twitter gets away with hosting way worse content, but life is unfair, that doesn't mean you stick your head in the sand an…

If you listen to the Megyn Kelly interview with Parler's CEO, they did expect this and had a second entirely different hosting provider lined up. They would have made the move by the deadline too, except the second hosting provider also dropped them due to extreme pressure.

I do believe that should've also been in their threat model - these guys should've acted like they were hosting The Pirate Bay 2 given the state of American politics. For instance, they could've had a low-traffic backup in read-only mode, or prevent new sign-ups. Or have an application layer switch to reduce outgoing bandwidth (HTML only) to squeeze into a coloc facility on short notice.

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

#12
post #4

Parlers goal of being the alternate free speech platform is horrendously thought out. The same companies and that they are trying to remove influence from (Silicon Valley - amazon, twitter, facebook, etc.) are the same companies that they're doing business with. Gab is ridiculous and I get a very religious "holier than thou" (lol) vibe from them. Their founder(s) are very puritanical and will likely not survive the n…

Gab is doing great and growing like crazy.

Edit: Downvoted for facts.

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

#13
post #4

Parlers goal of being the alternate free speech platform is horrendously thought out. The same companies and that they are trying to remove influence from (Silicon Valley - amazon, twitter, facebook, etc.) are the same companies that they're doing business with. Gab is ridiculous and I get a very religious "holier than thou" (lol) vibe from them. Their founder(s) are very puritanical and will likely not survive the n…

The 'free speech platforms' almost always skew towards the extremest side (more so over time)and aren't anything about the benefits we think of when it comes to free speech, lots of ideas that can be discussed, and we can think about and learn from.

I wonder how that can be avoided.

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

#14

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…

> It concerns me that AWS booted a site off their platform for speech issues They booted Parler off for violence issues. One may personally disagree about where to draw that blurry line, but I think there's more than enough plausible deniability here. This is not the trigger of a grand slippery slope. If Amazon drops a company purely for non-violent political differences, by all means, lets raise those pitchforks.

Apparently mostly facebook was used, not parler.

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

#15
post #4

Parlers goal of being the alternate free speech platform is horrendously thought out. The same companies and that they are trying to remove influence from (Silicon Valley - amazon, twitter, facebook, etc.) are the same companies that they're doing business with. Gab is ridiculous and I get a very religious "holier than thou" (lol) vibe from them. Their founder(s) are very puritanical and will likely not survive the n…

I think the main issue is that people expect free. And free means ads (unless some billionaire is going to fund it out of pocket). And ads means you can't have child porn and terrorism on your platform.

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

#17

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…

> It concerns me that AWS booted a site off their platform for speech issues They booted Parler off for violence issues. One may personally disagree about where to draw that blurry line, but I think there's more than enough plausible deniability here. This is not the trigger of a grand slippery slope. If Amazon drops a company purely for non-violent political differences, by all means, lets raise those pitchforks.

These things always start with moves that sound completely reasonable. Only time will tell if they expand their moderation demands.

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

#18
post #4

Parlers goal of being the alternate free speech platform is horrendously thought out. The same companies and that they are trying to remove influence from (Silicon Valley - amazon, twitter, facebook, etc.) are the same companies that they're doing business with. Gab is ridiculous and I get a very religious "holier than thou" (lol) vibe from them. Their founder(s) are very puritanical and will likely not survive the n…

> People have traded freedom for convenience over the past couple of decades and it shows. I'd argue the completely other way: people have traded convenience for freedom. The convenience of using the Internet for has massively eroded freedom of speech. It's been immensely convenient for tens of thousands of people to be able to say any kind of harmful trash on the Internet without suffering any negative consequences…

Another problem is the term 'harm' (just like 'freedom of speech') has also been poisoned by those on the left who would have you believe words are more dangerous than actual violence.

When actual discussions and conversations cannot take place under the guise of pretend harm, real violence happens.

I do wholeheartedly believe the attack on the capitol is just the result of a disenfranchised part of the population who've been shit on and deplatformed for the last 4 years by the establishment (including Orange Man, FWIW).

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

#19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It concerns me that AWS booted a site off their platform for speech issues They booted Parler off for violence issues. One may personally disagree about where to draw that blurry line, but I think there's more than enough plausible deniability here. This is not the trigger of a grand slippery slope. If Amazon drops a company purely for non-violent political differences, by all means, lets raise those pitchforks.

These things always start with moves that sound completely reasonable. Only time will tell if they expand their moderation demands.

Sure. And yet, completely reasonable things overwhelmingly tend not to lead to extreme outcomes. Only time will tell, but the point is that this is hardly an urgent warning sign.

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

#20

As much as I don't like Parler's digital death sentence from Silicon Valley, they should've known this was coming and prepared. It doesn't take a genius to know that such a controversial website is going to get dropped, even if it's just because it makes the webhost look bad. Yes it's unfair that Twitter gets away with hosting way worse content, but life is unfair, that doesn't mean you stick your head in the sand an…

I've heard other people say similar claims (about Twitter hosting equal/greater amounts of hate speech, threats, etc.). Totally plausible and I wouldn't be surprised if it were definitively true, but have there been any data driven studies to back it up?

Don't know if sentiment analysis ML algorithms are powerful enough to do something like this, but there has to be some scientific consensus on the relative hateful content that each site allows right? Or at least some pretty graphs.

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