Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Parler drops offline after Amazon pulls support

bbc.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

671–680 of 1001 posts

Re: Parler drops offline after Amazon pulls support

#671

Post by jounker »

celdon25 wrote: post #636
bird_monster wrote: post #574

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm struggling to try to understand what this means for the risks of running a business in the cloud going forward. It was not just AWS dropping them, but many of their other vendors dropped them too, essentially killing their business overnight. Businesses that are not terror cells have nothing to worry about. Companies have always pulled away from extremist groups. You wouldn't expect Microsoft to accept a contra…

> Businesses that are not terror cells have nothing to worry about. What is your definition of a terror cell? Do Amazon, Microsoft, and Google qualify as terror cells for competing for billion dollar contracts with the DoD? This is an absurd benchmark with no basis in reality. https://cnbc.com/2019/10/25/microsoft-wins-major-defense-clo...

You are making a false equivalency.

Parler exists solely to provide a place for right wing ideology to escape from facebook and twitter’s moderation and fact checking policies.

It has already been used as one of the primary means of coordinating an attempted coup, and it was being used to coordinate subsequent attempts on the 19th and 20th. This is the activity which was not effectively being moderated, and arguably it was the kind of activity that it was created to foment.

Re: Parler drops offline after Amazon pulls support

#672

Post by chmod600 »

throwaway5752 wrote: post #644
chmod600 wrote: post #586

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the Jan 6 insurrection was OK, or even close. My point is that the tools for organizing an insurrection are being removed, and that's at least a little scary. It's like fitting everyone with a shock collar and saying it will only be used against insurrectionists. The government will be a lot less worried about resistance, and the definition of "insurrectionist" is likely to move over time. It just doesn…

That's a really fair point, and it's a really hard problem. In this case, you had people trying to overthrow a democratic vote. So they are literally the enemies of a free society. But the same laws and infrastructure to prevent this can be misused. That's the hard stop. You can't have a governmental system that is fault tolerant to malicious misrule. You need to apply laws or laws lose power, and you need to trust t…

Trust isn't about blind, 100% trust. You can trust democracy to work without fitting yourself with a shock collar controlled by the pooular vote. You can trust government officials without assigning them blanket power of attorney.

I am just saying that there are limits to trust. And when someone you 99.9% trust tries to convince you to give them 100% trust, you should pause.

Re: Parler drops offline after Amazon pulls support

#673

Post by klmadfejno »

burrows wrote: post #662
yongjik wrote: post #542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The bar for getting "canceled" is already moving up ... Eh I'm not so sure about that? I mean, "Did your userbase activately participate in a plot to storm the Capitol and potentially take lawmakers and the VP of the State as hostages (or worse)?" is an awfully high bar to clear.

And if my hypothetical platform is decentralized to the extent that I can’t top-down censor content, what then?

That is simply a different question

Re: Parler drops offline after Amazon pulls support

#674

Post by adrr »

creatorbytes wrote: post #417
cactus2093 wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What are the best mitigations here, both technical and social? Vocally side with the popular issues, or try to stay completely out of them, to try to avoid becoming a target (e.g., social media presence)? For now, don't attempt to overturn a fair democratic election and install an illegitimate government. Seems like a pretty easy thing to stay clear of. I get the concern you're expressing, but not everything is a s…

That’s quite the straw man. We should separate an issue of moderation and actual motives of the platform itself. Did the platform have algorithms to make pro-capital storming posts ascend higher than other equally engaged posts? Did the owner/company make a call to violence? Did their platform spike in popularity in such a short time frame, they were unable to moderate to the same degree as other platforms? (Even Goo…

Parler wasn’t deleted because of public pressure alone. It was deleted because of AWS customers that threatened to leave. Last thing large enterprise customers want is to be caught up in is a controversy. Amazon made a business decision. No tech executive wants to explain to their CEO that they got boycotted due to a tech vendor choice. If AWs didn’t kick off Parler, the boycott of AWS based customers was coming.

No company should be forced to lose money.

Re: Parler drops offline after Amazon pulls support

#675

Post by jmull »

jlkuester7 wrote: post #469
cactus2093 wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What are the best mitigations here, both technical and social? Vocally side with the popular issues, or try to stay completely out of them, to try to avoid becoming a target (e.g., social media presence)? For now, don't attempt to overturn a fair democratic election and install an illegitimate government. Seems like a pretty easy thing to stay clear of. I get the concern you're expressing, but not everything is a s…

> not everything is a slippery slope From a risk management perspective, this does not seem like a safe assumption to make. The DailyStormer got "canceled" by vendors for not even trying to moderate content that actively promoted violence (among other horrible things). Now Parlor gets "canceled" by vendors for not doing a good enough job trying to moderate content promoting violence. The bar for getting "canceled" is…

> Now Parlor gets "canceled" by vendors for not doing a good enough job trying to moderate content promoting violence.

Parler got canceled for something a lot worse than the Daily Stormer.

Re: Parler drops offline after Amazon pulls support

#676

Post by quickthrowman »

bawolff wrote: post #639
zmb_ wrote: post #321

I'm struggling to try to understand what this means for the risks of running a business in the cloud going forward. It was not just AWS dropping them, but many of their other vendors dropped them too, essentially killing their business overnight. Granted, for this first case the bar was extremely high. You needed literal storming of the Capitol and a platform seemingly specifically targeted at those people for this t…

The best mitigation is negotiating strong contracts with significant penalties if the provider does not provide the services promised. Its not like getting screwed over because a vendor changes its mine about fulfilling its obligations half way through is a new issue, this is just a bit of an exceptional case of that.

No provider is going to sign a contract that forces them to host illegal content that opens them up to liability.

Re: Parler drops offline after Amazon pulls support

#677

Post by nhoughto »

zmb_ wrote: post #321

I'm struggling to try to understand what this means for the risks of running a business in the cloud going forward. It was not just AWS dropping them, but many of their other vendors dropped them too, essentially killing their business overnight. Granted, for this first case the bar was extremely high. You needed literal storming of the Capitol and a platform seemingly specifically targeted at those people for this t…

Kinda interesting as a threat model, if 4chan/the wrong people can maliciously use your service enough to get it cancelled / shutdown just for the lols. I imagine a few startups aren’t building moderating content / moderation teams as part of their MVP..

Re: Parler drops offline after Amazon pulls support

#678

Post by jounker »

zmb_ wrote: post #321

I'm struggling to try to understand what this means for the risks of running a business in the cloud going forward. It was not just AWS dropping them, but many of their other vendors dropped them too, essentially killing their business overnight. Granted, for this first case the bar was extremely high. You needed literal storming of the Capitol and a platform seemingly specifically targeted at those people for this t…

Don’t run a social network designed to host right wing extremists, and you should be fine.

Re: Parler drops offline after Amazon pulls support

#679

Post by klmadfejno »

jlkuester7 wrote: post #469
cactus2093 wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What are the best mitigations here, both technical and social? Vocally side with the popular issues, or try to stay completely out of them, to try to avoid becoming a target (e.g., social media presence)? For now, don't attempt to overturn a fair democratic election and install an illegitimate government. Seems like a pretty easy thing to stay clear of. I get the concern you're expressing, but not everything is a s…

> not everything is a slippery slope From a risk management perspective, this does not seem like a safe assumption to make. The DailyStormer got "canceled" by vendors for not even trying to moderate content that actively promoted violence (among other horrible things). Now Parlor gets "canceled" by vendors for not doing a good enough job trying to moderate content promoting violence. The bar for getting "canceled" is…

Doesn't sound like the bar is moving to me from your examples. Not moderating content promoting violence is a decent bar.

> any company that is hosting user-driven content needs to have a plan for how to make sure they stay below that bar.

Yes... They need to moderate out content that promotes violence. This is a thing that they should do.

Re: Parler drops offline after Amazon pulls support

#680

Post by epistasis »

junon wrote: post #653
epistasis wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If these companies are "shutting you down" for your speech, it's the same sort of speech that would have gotten you shut down in the public square. Have they shut down text messaging, phone calls, group messaging, all the encrypted messaging apps? Do the tech companies control postal mail, letters to the editor, and printing presses? Of course not. You are looking for others to give you a platform to reach a wide aud…

> If these companies are "shutting you down" for your speech, it's the same sort of speech that would have gotten you shut down in the public square. That's some Grade A corporate apologetics there. How can you assert this? Who decides what is going to get you "shut down in the public square"?

Who determines what speech gets shut down in the public square? In the US, it's a mixture of courts and legislation setting laws and their interpretations, lawsuits establishing damages for certain types of speech, and then of course cops on the ground making individual decisions on a case by case basis and using violence or threat of violence to arrest people.

I am not sure how any of this is apologizing for corporations instead of any other aspect of our system though...

Edit: For the lawsuit aspect of shutting down speech, check out this very topical lawsuit: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/01/11/cybersecu...

Even if this particular suit fails, I hope that it demonstrates that there are entire bodies of law set up to silence some forms of speech.

Post reply on HN