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Parler drops offline after Amazon pulls support

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Parler drops offline after Amazon pulls support

#311

Post by ccsnags »

hashbig wrote: post #164
chasing wrote: post #41

Parler wasn't some innocent social media site that happened to have some disgusting content on it. The disgusting content was literally its reason for existing, despite all of the bland "we're just a free speech site" stuff. And I have yet to hear anyone discuss how "anything goes" and social media do not mix. It's much easier to turn a community toxic than it is to keep it healthy, and healthy communities (of any so…

I remember very well as a middle eastern how ISIS was freely allowed to use Twitter, Facebook and Youtube for recruitment and propaganda in 2015 and none of those platforms did anything about it. Also just today this story was on the front page in HN: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/06/technology/myanmar-facebo... So spare us all the "No hate and violence on our platform" BS. Either you go after all hate and violence…

There’s plenty of hate on Twitter. They won’t go after all hate and they don’t care that you think they are hypocrites.

Stop trying to convince these people of hypocrisy. They aren’t listening to critics and they lack the ability to see the world outside of the tight frame they were provided. We are all like this most of the time but I find that the moral panics have created situations where online communication is not possible along political lines.

Focus on you, not them. People who build ideas from self-reflection are less volatile and not as susceptible to moral panic than those who define themselves by politics.

If all people tried as hard to understand each other as they do framing their political opponents as evil, we wouldn’t be in this place. Interesting times.

Re: Parler drops offline after Amazon pulls support

#312

Post by whatsmyusername »

jeffreyrogers wrote: post #131

This is troubling. I understand the 1st amendment argument, but isn't this more an anti-trust case? If a baker won't bake you a cake because you're gay there are dozens of other bakeries nearby that will, regardless of the merits or lackthereof of choosing not to bake a cake in that situation. If your service provider kicks you off their platform they've destroyed your entire business. I understand if they won't allo…

You're welcome to start your own ideologically compatible service provider. There are literally thousands of VPS hosts/cPanel farms/colo facilities/etc that they can do business out of that won't care (I know because I end up blocking a lot of them due to malicious traffic).

You're not owed AWS's product and it's not required to build this kind of infrastructure. Sure it makes it easier, maybe try being less repugnant?

Re: Parler drops offline after Amazon pulls support

#313

Post by CivBase »

chasing wrote: post #41

Parler wasn't some innocent social media site that happened to have some disgusting content on it. The disgusting content was literally its reason for existing, despite all of the bland "we're just a free speech site" stuff. And I have yet to hear anyone discuss how "anything goes" and social media do not mix. It's much easier to turn a community toxic than it is to keep it healthy, and healthy communities (of any so…

To be fair, any social media platform built on the idea of protecting free speech will be the only platform on which "disgusting content" can be posted. That means it will inherently have a disproportionately large amount of "disgusting content".

And that's before considering the insane uphill battle any social media platform has to fight to become as popular as the likes of Twitter, Facebook, etc - assuming the presence of "disgusting content" does not limit its ability to ever scale that much to begin with.

Btw, I'm using the phrase "disgusting content" to quote the OP because I can't think of a more appropriate phrase, not to indicate sarcasm or cast doubt on the nature of the content. I've never been to Parler, but I trust that there was some pretty awful things being said there.

Re: Parler drops offline after Amazon pulls support

#314

Post by minimuffins »

jmull wrote: post #160
minimuffins wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> Where on earth does the authority come from, which authorizes Amazon, ostensibly a private corporation, to arbitrate ANYTHING to do with public speech? Where would the authority come from to force Amazon to support a message board they believe is for the purpose of inciting and organizing violent insurrection? Why shouldn’t Amazon be able to make judgements about who it’s safe to do business with? Why should Parler…

Yes. Legally probably no one did anything wrong. My claim is not that any party behaved inappropriately according to law or the ordinary norms of doing business. Amazon is "within its rights." No argument.

But if you look at this situation and don't see problems that are expanding beyond the ability of laissez faire contracts to account for (I'll be specific: it's the concentrated accumulation of communicative and cultural capital to a tiny number of minimally publicly accountable, opaque, private, exceedingly deep-pocketed firms), you're burying your head in the sand.

Re: Parler drops offline after Amazon pulls support

#315

Post by readams »

cs-szazz wrote: post #77

Serious question, it seems AWS is by no means a monopoly on web hosting (Google, Azure, Digital Ocean, Linode, the list goes on). It seems to be they're well within their rights as a company to not host Parler, and Parler can try to go somewhere else. If no other companies want to host Parler, isn't that more a reflection of Parler than the hosting companies? It doesn't seem like they should be obligated to host, sin…

You can ask the question of whether you think in general that marginalized voices should be allowed to exist. Obviously, you don't like these particular people (and neither do I) so you don't see any problem with eradicating their voice. If Amazon were just one provider and there were other options it might even then still be OK. But it's not just a choice of Amazon. Any provider hosting them will be subject to the cancel mob.

Picture instead private businesses who all refuse to do business with Jews. Anyone who does business with them are subject to reprisal and boycott by their vendors, friends, and neighbors. The Jews themselves of course are fired from their jobs if anyone finds out they're a Jew. In practice the Jews cannot do business and must live a marginalized existence or hide who they are. So it's not enough to say "well it's a private business they can do what they want" when you would not consider this valid in other contexts.

And of course all this is ignoring the question of whether any of this is likely to be successful in the end or if it will further justify reprisals and enrage anyone subject to this mob justice. Certainly all the tech companies banding together to silence politics they don't like plays exactly into the narrative the far right is pushing.

Re: Parler drops offline after Amazon pulls support

#316

Post by julianlam »

cabalamat wrote: post #136
mgkimsal wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I poked around on it some, and noticed something ... disturbing. I saw what I assumed were bots posting a lot of garbage links to 'articles' like "Obama compound raided!" and "8 Democrats switch to Republican Party" (that actually happened in Feb 2020, but the link was to an undated rerun and the link was posted.. 2 days ago?). The links were to such trustworthy sites as 'firstusanews.us' (made up, but all variants l…

> the only way to get 'badged' is to use the mobile app and take a picture of govt ID (driver license, passport, etc). Some people have argued, based on this, that Parler was set up by the NSA to get data on people. Hoovering up data from social media is certainly the sort of thing the NSA would do.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_intelligence

Re: Parler drops offline after Amazon pulls support

#317

Post by frogpelt »

explorigin wrote: post #70
mgkimsal wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I poked around on it some, and noticed something ... disturbing. I saw what I assumed were bots posting a lot of garbage links to 'articles' like "Obama compound raided!" and "8 Democrats switch to Republican Party" (that actually happened in Feb 2020, but the link was to an undated rerun and the link was posted.. 2 days ago?). The links were to such trustworthy sites as 'firstusanews.us' (made up, but all variants l…

I was also curious about Parler but, when going to sign up, it asked for my phone number. Ummmm, no thank you. That kind of association is like going to a protest with your cellphone. Pretty easy to get the wrong kind of association attached to you.

Does your choice of words cause you to pause and think about where we are as a society?

The "wrong kind of association" for creating a social media account?

Re: Parler drops offline after Amazon pulls support

#318

Post by shrimpx »

ryanmarsh wrote: post #303

Could a Muslim owned cloud service drop a gay customer, say an app like Grindr? I recall a case about a baker and a gay couple or something. Is this a civil matter or criminal? I grew up in a different era seriously none of this makes sense. Which groups are legally allowed to cancel the others? Where is that set forth in law? Thanks.

Literally any company can drop any user. It’s in their terms of service. Of course there is a lot of calculation around dropping a high profile user, or a large class of users. It could result in social upheaval and backlash if they do or do not drop someone.

Re: Parler drops offline after Amazon pulls support

#319

Post by loveistheanswer »

gurjeet wrote: post #206

This being HN I expected more commentary around how a company can/should build technology to survive such incidents, and not go down just because one of your providers either blocked you or themselves went down.

It is funny that a social media company seeking to escape from the big tech stranglehold would decide to host their platform using a big tech cloud provider.

Re: Parler drops offline after Amazon pulls support

#320

Post by reddog »

andrewmutz wrote: post #161
notsureaboutpg wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The NYT lied to the American public to whip them up into supporting the Iraq War, which led to the deaths of millions of people (many of them innocent). Why won't AWS, Google, and Apple collectively ban them? Their open calls for violence were far more consequential and severe and serious than anything on Parler

The Iraq war is a great example because it highlights how rare this is. You had to go back 15 years to find an example of the mainstream media misleading people on this scale. It can be true that both: - The NYT deserves a lot of blame for the lead up to the iraq war ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Miller#The_Iraq_War ) - Newspapers generally do a really good job of fact checking the articles they print

>You had to go back 15 years to find an example of the mainstream media misleading people on this scale.

Have you forgotten 3 years of the MSN saying Trump's presidency was illegitament because he stole the election by coluding with the Russians?

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