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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

#141
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain?

Sure, I'll circle back with a longer form response in a few minutes. In the meantime, I find it interesting that people think down voting my comment will intimidate me into changing the analysis. That's not how legal judgment works. That's not how anything works...

Maybe they, like me, read the court's frankly damning opinion and didn't find that your fact-less argument from authority contributed to the discussion.

If you wanted to write a "long form" (?) reply then you could have done so. In the meantime the hand wave above has to stand on its own merits; or more specifically fall on its lack thereof.

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

#142

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.

> They booted Parler off for violence issues. It baffles me how often violence issues become conflated with speech issues. You are absolutely correct, this is a violence issue. America has likely the most free speech protections in the world, but fighting words (violence) are not protected. There is a huge amount of precdent to support Amazon's actions here, dating back decades. Furthermore, just because Facebook did…

Because violence to advance a cause the powers agree with is suddenly protected under free speech all the same.

Many have pointed out that the storming of the capitol was not too dissimilar to many of the b.l.m. riots which were also often coördinated and featured chants of killing police officers.

And it very much seems that whichever side one be on very much dictates how both are treated with both sides claiming that it is about violence irrespective of speech, but it's quite clear that the tolerance for violence is quite a bit lower when it concern an ideology one does not agree with.

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

#143
Honestly Parler just needs to park their front end someplace, don’t think anyone would be the wiser if they used AWS on the backend for their database/storage.

But on the other hand Parler’s tech people seem mediocre so who knows if they could manage to not leak AWS ips or headers that would tip off they are using AWS and allow Amazon to figure out which account. Would only take one slip.

If they pay their bills and it wasn’t dead obvious AWS was involved then Amazon might not try hard to find them.

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

#144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worth noting how much soft power the political left in America has, despite being about 50% of voters. Hollywood, Silicon Valley, academia, and the news media all lean left. This means you should expect to have an uphill battle if you want to do anything in these areas that might counter their preferences. I think all this soft power actually hurts the left in America, because our country's default state is a bi…

It's worth noting how much actual political power the right in America has, despite being about 50% of voters. The Senate and electoral college favor them massively. This means you should expect to have an uphill battle if you want to change any laws that might counter their preferences.

The Democratic Presidential candidate has won the popular vote in the last 7 of 8 Presidential elections[0], with the Dems having, on average, about 5 million more votes for those 8 elections. It's empirically fair to say the right represents about 45% of voters (which makes their power even more noteworthy).

[0] year,dem_candidate,dem_votes,gop_candidate,gop_votes

1992,Bill Clinton,44909806,George H. W. Bush,39104550

1996,Bill Clinton,47401185,Bob Dole,39197469

2000,Al Gore,50999897,George W. Bush,50456002

2004,John Kerry,59028444,George W. Bush,62040610

2008,Barack Obama,69498516,John McCain,59948323

2012,Barack Obama,65915795,Mitt Romney,60933504

2016,Hillary Clinton,65853514,Donald Trump,62984828

2020,Joe Biden,81268867,Donald Trump,74216747

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

#145
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we had a fully P2P and distributed architecture for information exchange, this wouldn't be a problem. As it stands, we choose centralized websites and platforms to be how we exchange information. They're an essential ingredient in the "common carrier" recipe. How can your parents share messages without Comcast + Facebook?

E-mail

Is email the predominant form of communication people?

How many teenagers are raving about sending memes over email?

edit: My point isn't to say email isn't an instance of federated/p2p communication, but rather we need more types of communication to be run on P2P rails. Social, forums, media...

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

#146
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain?

Sure, I'll circle back with a longer form response in a few minutes. In the meantime, I find it interesting that people think down voting my comment will intimidate me into changing the analysis. That's not how legal judgment works. That's not how anything works...

[deleted]

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

#147
post #54

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 I'm sorry for the caps but you and a host of others are forgetting something repeatedly and it's getting fairly annoying: AMAZON HAS FREE SPEECH RIGHTS TOO. Just as Parler does, and you do, and I do, and Twitter does, and the various owners and employees of these organizations do, and on and on. It's Free Speech all the way down. And a funda…

Amazon also has monopolistic power and has destroyed many industries.

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

#148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worth noting how much actual political power the right in America has, despite being about 50% of voters. The Senate and electoral college favor them massively. This means you should expect to have an uphill battle if you want to change any laws that might counter their preferences.

A business that is heavily involved with local government has to sweat Republican politics, a business that is heavily involved with technology, the media, or other forms of nonstate power has to sweat Democrat politics. I guess it would be nice if companies could simply focus on getting their job done and not have to sweat anyone's politics at all.

Companies have to obey laws and laws are written by politicians. Unless you think companies should be above the law they cannot, and should not be expected to, avoid thinking about politics.

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

#149

I don't understand what's keeping the Parler team from just standing up their own servers in a garage somewhere. Its still an early stage platform, and its not like they were experiencing explosive growth as far as I understand. This seems like a perfect use case for a small home server. If they find a revenue stream then they can scale to renting some rack space somewhere. I know its not as easy as clicking a button…

I think you underestimate their size. They were a lot larger than a home server.

As far as hosting, it can certainly be done privately, but it requires more work than cloud hosting, as gab learned when they went entirely internally hosted.

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