[HN Gopher] Parler's de-platforming shows the exceptional power ...
___________________________________________________________________
Parler's de-platforming shows the exceptional power of cloud
providers
Author : BlackPlot
Score : 100 points
Date : 2021-01-18 15:35 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cnbc.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cnbc.com)
| peter303 wrote:
| Parler says they will return by by February. There is too much
| financial opportunity for large niche ideologies. They will miss
| the inauguration drama as the deplatformers intended. I wonder
| what alternative stack Parler will use.
| trident5000 wrote:
| It was a great reminder of why I will never use Apple Icloud or
| OneDrive, etc.
| millzlane wrote:
| It also shows the resiliency of the internet. Parler's ability to
| build their own failsafe network rests on them. I learned a lot
| of hard lessons with my first failed startup. One of them was not
| to rely on another platform for my success. If TPB can do it
| being enemies of nation states. I think Parler will be just fine.
| decasia wrote:
| The thing is, you're always going to dependent on _someone_ in
| the mainstream economic world if you want to have a web presence
| in North America. Even if you run your own servers, you 're at
| the mercy of your hosting provider, your ISP, your DNS registrar,
| and even browser level things like Google Safe Browsing. Any of
| these can be major points of failure.
|
| So yeah, not using AWS would avoid being dependent on AWS, but
| you're going to depend on someone. In this sense, inclusion on
| the internet ultimately has a political dimension. I think that's
| just how it is -- we live in a society with politics.
|
| (I'm omitting commentary on Parler in particular because I have
| no sympathy for them in this or any other case.)
| millzlane wrote:
| TBH most "Free speech" platforms will allow anything except
| fraud, child porn, and calls to violence that violate criminal
| law. Baring all of that. There are still places online to host
| whatever you want.
| decasia wrote:
| Yeah, I know those services are out there. I thought most of
| them were physically located outside North America though, is
| that not true?
| [deleted]
| redisman wrote:
| It's pretty baffling how people all of a sudden expect Fortune
| 500 companies to not act "politically correct" when bad actors
| are breaking their TOSes. Was there ever a medium backed by a
| large corporation where you could post calls to violence
| against politicians without getting booted off?
| jimmydorry wrote:
| Twitter, Facebook, Youtube come to mind. The two that
| immediately come to mind would be Kathy Griffin holding
| Trump's severed head and Eminem shooting a Trump look-a-like.
| Neither were deplatformed for these graphic depictions /
| calls to violence, and one even reposted the offensive media
| in November.
| lisper wrote:
| I gotta say, recent events have left me shaken to my core. I
| thought I believed in free speech, to the point where I started a
| company dedicated to providing privacy and communications
| products that were not subject to control by any central
| authority (that turns out to be very hard!) But watching the
| events of the past few years unfold I am no longer convinced that
| this would really make the world a better place. I always thought
| that in the end cooler heads would prevail. But we've now done
| the experiment in a big way and the results seem overwhelmingly
| negative to me, to the point where they present a credible
| existential threat to civilization, on a par with climate change.
|
| Maybe someone here can talk me down from this new position. But
| the evidence seems pretty overwhelming to me right now.
| snarf21 wrote:
| It is a challenge. Giving people a voice means that good and
| bad (depending on anyone's personal view) voices are amplified.
| Hate is strong and it takes time for people to "have enough",
| only then do cooler heads prevail.
|
| The main issue is the ability to amplify and spread so easily.
| Social media is built upon addiction because addicted people
| view more ads. How different would social media look with just
| a few changes like no ability to repost/retweet/copy&paste/etc
| and what if you never saw who liked a post and what if you
| weren't show things that your networked liked? These things are
| what creates the echo chamber. People are lazy. Most wouldn't
| take the time to gather information and create original posts.
|
| I think privacy is another issue. We should always have some
| expectations of privacy. Regardless of which party you favor,
| what if the government bans your way of thinking? The ability
| to share a counter message is crucial to any stable system. If
| there is only ever one message, all is lost and you see things
| like North Korea.
|
| I think there are ways to do communications applications that
| are freedom empowering and not subject to a central authority.
| The question comes down to support. Will people pay for that or
| use the free ones that abuse them with ads and manufactured
| outrage? I'm curious on what your product vision is, could you
| give an elevator pitch?
| pmlnr wrote:
| > But watching the events of the past few years unfold I am no
| longer convinced that this would really make the world a better
| place.
|
| One hard truth: it would have been enough to look at European
| laws made after WWII, and adopt them in the US as well in the
| first place.
| eznzt wrote:
| "In Europe, Speech Is an Alienable Right: [the European Court
| of Human Rights] upheld an Austrian woman's conviction for
| disparaging the Prophet Muhammad."
|
| https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/its-not-
| fr...
|
| Is this really what you want?
| dan-robertson wrote:
| What do you mean by "European"? And what laws are you talking
| about?
|
| Does this include the laws made in East Berlin or other
| communist countries? Do you think Le Pen didn't get into
| power because of free speech laws? It seems to me like she
| just didn't have quite enough support to get in.
|
| What about the laws made in post-communist countries like
| Poland or Hungary or Belarus? (Or Lithuania or Latvia?)
|
| Perhaps you mean countries like Sweden or Norway? It does at
| least seems to make the news there when some neo-nazi is
| punished for what American prosecutors would have to consider
| free speech.
| [deleted]
| pmlnr wrote:
| I thought it's obvious from the context, but examples
| include denying the holocaust being a crime.
| whatshisface wrote:
| I don't see why a future collapse into tyranny of a
| country in Europe would have to involve a revival of the
| symbols of any particular defeated regime. If they needed
| symbols for propaganda purposes, they draw from legal
| symbol pools, like Roman culture. (It "worked" once...)
| More likely, they would draw from contemporary symbols
| that already had positive sentiment associated with them.
|
| The point being, it's not clear whether German speech
| laws are frosting or cake. If the German people wanted to
| destroy Europe and themselves, that would be enough
| whether they did it with the symbols of a defeated
| dictator or not. People point to European speech laws as
| examples of reasonable protections, but I'm not sure if
| they're stopping anything. The real bar against the
| collapse of liberal democracy is the fact that the people
| living in those countries don't want it to happen, and
| understand why it would be bad for them.
| ardy42 wrote:
| > I don't see why a future collapse into tyranny of a
| country in Europe would have to involve a revival of the
| symbols of any particular defeated regime.
|
| In the US, at least, the current (seemingly unsuccessful)
| slouch towards tyranny definitely _does_ involve the
| revival symbols of _a particular_ defeated regime: the
| Confederacy (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/14/us/Kevin-
| Seefried-arreste...).
|
| Though it might not really be a "revival," since the
| symbols were never really killed off in the first place.
| A lot of the flashpoints building up to this one involved
| removal of these symbols.
| stretchcat wrote:
| > _More likely, they would draw from contemporary symbols
| that already had positive sentiment associated with
| them._
|
| Yes I think so. In fact, that's precisely what the nazis
| did with the swastika.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_use_of_the_swastika
| _in...
| dan-robertson wrote:
| I guess my question is really what the effect of such
| laws was? Obviously there has been general prosperity and
| peace between the Western European countries but this may
| have been due to other reasons.
|
| There doesn't seem to be much more resilience in the
| population to the kind rhetoric we've seen recently in
| America. Indeed, there seem to be many parallels. Maybe
| the laws helped but we see less difference now as Europe
| after the war started "further behind"?
|
| It's certainly true that holocaust denial is illegal in
| Germany. It isn't, for example, illegal in the U.K.
| (there was a libel case lost by David Irving against
| someone who called him a Holocaust denier where he tried
| to prove he was a legitimate historian however), and
| there are surveys showing that some percentage of the
| population don't really believe it (but maybe this is the
| fact that for even seemingly trivial survey questions,
| some proportion of people give the wrong answer). I
| suppose here I would just point out that Europe is a big
| place.
| glogla wrote:
| Interestingly, "typical European Free Speech laws" are both
| more and less restricting than you would see in the US -
| there's more limits on harmful ideologies and violence but
| less restrictions on sex and nudity, for example.
|
| Of course it's not just constitutions and laws - movie
| ratings are not _de iure_ laws but work that way _de facto_ -
| and EU limits other things, like advertisement of
| pharmaceuticals.
|
| Comparing the different approaches needs finesse and not just
| "free US vs non-free Europe".
| tshaddox wrote:
| The trouble is when people conflate "free speech" with
| "absolute prohibition on any societal, cultural, or personal
| means of making any value judgment about any speech, as well as
| any mechanism whatsoever to encourage any type of speech and
| discourage any other type of speech." It's this "speech
| agnosticism" version of "free speech" that worries me.
| ardy42 wrote:
| > The trouble is when people conflate "free speech" with
| "absolute prohibition on any societal, cultural, or personal
| means of making any value judgment about any speech, as well
| as any mechanism whatsoever to encourage any type of speech
| and discourage any other type of speech." It's this "speech
| agnosticism" version of "free speech" that worries me.
|
| And that "speech agnosticism", ironically, is actually a
| _rejection_ of free speech. Free speech only really can work
| if the members of society act as a filter for bad stuff.
| tshaddox wrote:
| That's how I've come to think about it too. Free speech is
| vital to allow ideas to be expressed and criticized, in the
| same way that the methods of science are about conjecture
| and criticism. The ability to challenge orthodoxy is vital
| in science, but so is rejection of "bad science" and even
| more so rejection of the notion that there can be no
| discernment of any qualities of scientific claims.
| StanislavPetrov wrote:
| Perhaps you could being by asking yourself why a "central
| authority" is inherently more wise and capable of deciding what
| people are allowed to think and say than individuals
| themselves? Does the ability to seize power and become the
| central authority denote inherent wisdom or morality? History
| is littered with examples of societies where communications
| were overseen by a central authority, from Nazi Germany to the
| Soviet Union. The freedom to think and speak freely is
| dangerous - like all freedom. But before you reject the concept
| of freedom you ought to consider what the alternative is.
| lisper wrote:
| I don't know _why_ a central authority works better. But it
| seems to be manifestly true if you look at human history
| _that_ it works better once you try to scale society beyond
| the tribe. (At least by my personal quality metric. But I
| acknowledge that I am strongly biased by the fact that I 'm a
| rich white guy in a society dominated by rich white guys, so
| I'm definitely open to alternative ideas. But unfettered free
| speech doesn't seem to me to be working very well, and I
| don't think that's a reflection of my white privilege. The
| burden of covid, for example, is falling disproportionately
| on people of color in no small measure because of denialism.
| That seems like a bad outcome to me.)
| StanislavPetrov wrote:
| >I don't know why a central authority works better. But it
| seems to be manifestly true if you look at human history
| that it works better once you try to scale society beyond
| the tribe.
|
| Hundreds of millions of people who have been murdered in
| wars organized by central authorities would probably have a
| different opinion.
|
| > The burden of covid, for example, is falling
| disproportionately on people of color in no small measure
| because of denialism.
|
| If you think that the poorest and most marginalized people
| in society are the ones who stand to gain from a
| concentration of absolute power among a centralize
| governing authority, I urge you to learn some history.
| [deleted]
| inerte wrote:
| I was watching Legal Eagle discussing if Trump incited the mob
| / insurrection https://youtu.be/XwqAInN9HWI and he goes over
| some previous cases of "incitement of violence" and it's crazy
| how high the bar is.
|
| On the other hand, tech companies can very quickly take down
| illegal content, like child pornography or people singing Happy
| Birthday. I do think they have the technical chops + content
| moderators to at least try to curb some of the more
| inflammatory posts.
|
| But, it's not illegal. So they won't do it, in fact, they'll
| profit like Facebook matching body armor ads to groups of
| people plotting to hang the Vice President. The solution might
| be to lax the definition of imminent threat, or consider that
| someone with millions of followers is basically planning acts
| of violence with a retweet. The fact that people think "it's
| just a retweet" means you have zero responsibility and
| accountability for influencing millions of people shows how we
| are not prepared technological changes.
|
| I can't talk you out of it because I am very confused and
| conflicted. I think I know what needs change, and even how, but
| not change to what.
| MikeUt wrote:
| > consider that someone with millions of followers is
| basically planning acts of violence with a retweet
|
| So by your standard, would
| https://twitter.com/rezaaslan/status/1307107507131875330
| count as planning acts of violence, or would he need more
| followers first, since he's not at "millions" yet?
| inerte wrote:
| Oh my god! You got me, bro! You're so smart.
| MikeUt wrote:
| Let me be more direct - how do you think these powers of
| restriction on "influencing people" you want, will be
| used by an administration you don't want? Do you think
| there might be some foreign countries where such powers
| are already in place, that could give us a clue how
| things might turn out, or is America too much of a unique
| exception to be able to learn from anyone else's
| experience?
| danudey wrote:
| I would think that context is also important.
|
| Tweeting "burn the whole thing down" to a generally
| liberal crowd is a figure of speech which implies, by and
| large, the need for complete reform.
|
| To far-right "conservatives", white supremacists, violent
| insurrectionists, and paranoid militias, it implies
| something completely different.
|
| In other words, someone tweeting "burn the whole thing
| down" to a liberal following in regards to a judicial
| appointment is a very different thing from Trump or other
| far-right "influencers" tweeting "burn the whole thing
| down" to a large and frequently violent crowd in regards
| to their false claims of stolen elections, because it's
| reasonable to assume that people upset about the
| replacement of RBG aren't going to literally burn down
| the capitol, whereas it's clear that a (small but
| sufficiently significant) subset of Trump followers were
| not only willing to, but able to and intent on, burning
| down the Capitol in response to the false stolen election
| claims.
| haberman wrote:
| There has been plenty of liberal, non-figurative burning
| down just in the last year. For example:
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/us-
| news/live/2020/may/31/george-...
|
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/05/28/minneapo
| lis...
|
| https://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory/police-declare-
| riot-...
|
| https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/fire-chief-damage-
| kenosh...
| MrPatan wrote:
| But which one is it? I'm not smart, I'd like you to spell
| it out.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Well, this is the thing isn't it, threats of nonspecific
| violence are a normal part of American politics. You could
| find thousands of examples of that kind of thing from both
| sides.
|
| The unusual thing is turning that violence into reality.
|
| Would it be great to dial that down? Yes. Will the
| Republicans stop doing enraging things and calm the
| situation? No.
| myWindoonn wrote:
| It's not quite a plan, is it? Like, what exactly are they
| asking people to burn? "It"? And it's not necessarily
| advocating violence, either; while arson is terrible and
| destructive, it is not necessarily violence against people.
|
| It's pretty well short of actually calling people to
| violent acts. The wording would need to be more specific.
| MikeUt wrote:
| I hope the judge in my trial will be as charitable in
| their interpretation of my words, as you are to Reza
| Aslan's.
| myWindoonn wrote:
| Sure; they'd probably apply strict scrutiny [0]. In the
| USA, speech is typically protected _by default_ ; the
| burden of proof is on the prosecution to show that the
| speech was harmful.
|
| Seriously, have you never heard an angry American yell
| that they are frustrated with the status quo and would
| like to "burn it down" [1]? It is a common refrain and
| generally taken as a hyperbolic statement about the
| speaker's dissatisfaction with the actions of the
| government.
|
| Finally, if you're in the USA, you have the right to a
| trial by jury if you're accused of crimes [2]; you do not
| need to worry that some appointed judge will find your
| speech harmful, but rather that a panel of your peers
| will unanimously agree that your speech is harmful.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strict_scrutiny
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burn_It_Down
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixth_Amendment_to_the_
| United_...
| MikeUt wrote:
| You're discussing law as it currently stands, while the
| original poster proposed changing the law.
| fatsdomino001 wrote:
| What is the evidence that is convincing you that "we've now
| done the experiment [of free speech] in a big way and the
| results seem overwhelmingly negative"?
| Aerroon wrote:
| Free expression is chaotic. It always has been and it always
| will be. It will always have lies and misinformation, some
| people will even believe the lies. But this is also the beauty
| of free expression - it prevents anyone from using it to enact
| total control. Speech that is free will always seed doubt
| against ideas, regardless whether those ideas are true or
| false. It's an avenue that allows _anything_ to be questioned.
|
| Propaganda and misinformation have been around for a long time.
| Mark Antony and Octavius engaged in a war of misinformation.[0]
| People in those times had far fewer avenues of information. If
| somebody sold them a false story, then people were probably
| more likely to believe them. We're still here though.
|
| I think what's been happening over the recent years is that
| people have finally started waking up from the End of History.
| The world is as chaotic as always.
|
| [0]
| https://www.ft.com/content/aaf2bb08-dca2-11e6-86ac-f253db779...
| daniellarusso wrote:
| I have to concur, it really does make sense to me why both
| France and Germany ban things on eBay that is ok in the US.
| ghoward wrote:
| I wrote about why free speech is still important here:
| https://gavinhoward.com/2019/11/recommendations-and-radicali...
| .
|
| Basically, the problem is not free speech. It's the social
| media drive for addiction.
| lisper wrote:
| But that is exactly the problem: how do you separate the two?
| Once someone figures out a way to profit from "free speech"
| the profit motive takes over and infects the whole system. I
| don't see any way around that without compromising freedom.
| ghoward wrote:
| I think you are somewhat correct here, but I do think
| there's a solution.
|
| As a sibling says, I think changing social media to where
| users are the _customers_, and not the _product_, is the
| answer.
|
| I wrote about doing that here:
| https://gavinhoward.com/2020/07/decentralizing-the-
| internet-... .
| daniellarusso wrote:
| Freedom is not absolute and boundless.
| voodootrucker wrote:
| I think banning online advertising causing these sites to
| charge their users for the service would right a lot of
| wrongs automatically, when the free market can start to
| kick in and do it's job.
|
| It makes it so Facebook's product becomes online photo
| sharing, instead of it's current product which is
| manipulation and addiction.
|
| https://www.wired.com/story/why-dont-we-just-ban-targeted-
| ad...
| danudey wrote:
| Thanks for this link, it was a great read - and
| compelling.
| slg wrote:
| >I think banning online advertising
|
| So you want to limit speech in the name of protecting
| free speech?
| ogre_codes wrote:
| What exactly is "Free Speech" are we talking about the
| constitution or some hard to defend philosophical idea?
|
| There hasn't been any legal free speech issues here.
| Fundamentally, if you make a platform, you can (mostly) enforce
| whatever policies you want about the type of speech you allow.
| This is why Parler is trying to chase this from an anti-trust
| angle, not a 1st Amendment angle.
|
| If you are talking about the more general philosophical idea,
| keep in mind we are talking on Hacker News. Here, right now we
| are moderated. Much discussion on Parler which caused Apple,
| Google, and Amazon to hit them with the ban hammer is banned
| here as well. Likewise, most online forums ban talk of murder,
| rape, death threats, etc.
|
| Parler itself has policies against this kind of content, if
| they didn't, Apple at least wouldn't have allowed them on the
| App Store. Parler does not enforce their own Terms of Service.
| If they did, we wouldn't be here now.
| kypro wrote:
| The problem I have with this line of reasoning is that it isn't
| free speech that's the issue here, it's got far more to do with
| the echo chambers and feedback loops of social networks.
| However the solution to the social networks have created is to
| allow those very same social networks to have total authority
| over what speech is permitted online.
|
| It's fairly obvious by now to most people that these companies
| are biased, and even if you don't believe so yourself, the fact
| they have no reason not to be bias should be worrying enough.
| How do we explain why extremists like Richard Spencer are on
| Twitter, but the president of the US and Alex Jones is not? It
| seems if Twitter's goal is to protect you from extremists they
| do an awful job, but if their goal is to protect you from
| popular right-wing commentators they do a fairly good one.
|
| The same is true for platforms. The vast majority of the
| content on Parler was relatively benign, while Twitter and
| Facebook hosts far more content which we might consider
| "extremist". However, platforms like Facebook are too big to
| have to worry about being deplatformed so instead we distract
| ourselves by talking about how we should ban a bunch of
| irrelevant platforms that won't make an ounce of difference in
| the fight against extremism.
|
| I also think we need to put the last few years into some
| perspective. The domestic extremism we've seen in the US isn't
| really happening in Europe. Yeah, we have some far-right and
| far-left parties, but we always have. I live in the UK and just
| a few decades ago we had ethno-nationalists organising and
| staging terror attacks daily during The Troubles. In the 1900s
| we had the rise of various communist and facist groups all over
| the West which were arguably far more concerning than anything
| we've seen in recent years. So how exactly does the last few
| years stand out from anything we've seen in even recent
| history? It's different for sure, but it always is.
|
| Finally, I sometimes wonder how much of this panic over the
| dangers of free speech is manufactured. Free speech has always
| come at a cost, but we've always understood the alternative
| where a few elites have the power to forcibly suppress speech
| is far worse. Perhaps I'm wrong, but it seems to me that social
| media and much of the media have decided that what happened in
| the US capitol is far worse than anything that happened earlier
| this year when entire neighbourhoods were destroyed and police
| officers were being shot dead in cold blood because of lies and
| misconceptions being spread on social media. I saw very little
| talk back then about how we need to ban left-wing platforms or
| censor left wing activists. I personally saw several people I
| knew tweeting "ACAB" and suggesting violence is necessary in
| the summer who are now tweeting how awful the violence in the
| Capitol was, despite it being far less substantial in terms of
| deaths, destruction and casualties. I know these aren't bad
| people too, so I can only assume it was the media which
| convinced them that the endless rioting, looting and police
| murders were nothing new or anything to worry about, while a
| group of protestors storming the capitol has gone too far and
| that something urgently needs to be done about free speech. I
| don't mean to make this a right vs left thing, I'm just trying
| to point out how a lot of the panic over free speech seems to
| be manufactured, or at least leveraged to further political
| goals.
| cccc4all wrote:
| Always question everything you are told, especially by central
| authorities, mainstream popular media, etc.
|
| Seek out information from variety of sources and discern the
| truth from fiction.
|
| What you may think is evidence may be completely opposite of
| what it actually is.
|
| Especially any narratives that are pushed to convince people to
| voluntarily give up privacy and freedoms.
|
| Just look at all the regular people going around screaming at
| other people to put on masks. What happened to make these
| people go screaming at other people?
|
| If you're on this board and worked on tech projects, you should
| be able to spot propaganda in process.
|
| Good luck.
| amelius wrote:
| > Always question everything you are told, especially by
| central authorities, mainstream popular media, etc.
|
| This is how conspiracy theories start.
| cccc4all wrote:
| May I ask your definition of "conspiracy theory"?
| travisporter wrote:
| What makes central authorities and mainstream popular media
| inherently more suspicious?
|
| I disagree that having worked on tech projects would help you
| spot propaganda. It is illogical to assume you're an expert
| on the stock market just because you know how to code.
| (There's a fallacy name for this one which is escaping me)
| cccc4all wrote:
| First, high frequency trading is using code to gain alpha
| in stock market trading. Tech expertise is more important
| than reading balance sheets in this arena. It may be
| illogical, but it works and are used by many high profile
| Wall Street firms.
|
| Most people working in tech have sense of awareness, that
| things are not quite what they seem. That's why there are
| so many people in tech heavily involved in
| decentralization, crypto, etc.
| ipsocannibal wrote:
| I think you are confusing the freedom with the technologies
| used to amplify the use of that freedom. This is similar to the
| current debate about the second amendment. The right to bare
| arms doesn't mean we give everyone an M60. The freedom of
| speech doesn't mean that we should give everyone an unlimited
| megaphone to the world. Licenses for the use of powerful
| technologies have been pretty effective in limiting the damages
| they can cause in untrained hands. Maybe the solution to your
| troubles is a license to broadcast media on the internet.
| lisper wrote:
| > The right to bare [sic] arms doesn't mean we give everyone
| an M60.
|
| Actually, most second amendment advocates believe that this
| is exactly what it means. They think that the _whole point_
| of the second amendment is to empower people to resist the
| government by physical force.
| ipsocannibal wrote:
| And they are wrong as evidenced by many Supreme Court
| rulings. Find any point of view and I'll find a group of
| people that take that view to an untenable extreme. The
| only reason they have that view is because they live in a
| world where its not a reality. If it were those people
| would likely be dead due to a pandemic of gun violence.
| lisper wrote:
| > And they are wrong as evidenced by many Supreme Court
| rulings.
|
| Right. Because the Supreme Court never makes a mistake,
| never reverses itself, and is completely immune to
| political influence.
|
| If your best argument for being optimistic about the
| future of civilization is the Supreme Court then you've
| just made my point for me.
| ipsocannibal wrote:
| I think you made your point, or lack there of, when you
| considered my point invalid due to the lack of absolute
| perfection and infallibility of Supreme Court rulings.
| Absolutist thinking is generally a sign of a weak
| argument.
|
| Oh yeah, "as evidenced" doesn't mean "due to" as well.
| You might want to work on your reading comprehension
| there. The Supreme Court is mearly ratifying what the
| majority of Americans will accept. And handing everyone
| an M60 ain't it.
| pjc50 wrote:
| > If it were those people would likely be dead due to a
| pandemic of gun violence
|
| Isn't that what's happening here, that the belief in "the
| right to storm the capitol" has got out of hand? After a
| while it doesn't _matter_ that that 's not the SC ruling,
| if it's what enough people with guns believe.
|
| Prior to the viral pandemic people argued there was a
| pandemic of gun violence. It turned out that was a drop
| in the bucket. If the Vegas shooting happened today, it
| would be a mere blip in the excess death numbers from
| coronavirus.
| bluescrn wrote:
| Is the speech really the problem, or the echo chambers within
| which it is spoken?
|
| The marketplace of ideas can't really function if people are
| only ever presented with a carefully tailored safe/comfortable
| subset of ideas.
| Analemma_ wrote:
| But what's the solution then? "We are going to forcibly
| expose you to speech you'd rather not see, for the greater
| good" is no less dystopian than just banning people.
| Nursie wrote:
| I'm afraid I have to concur - in the face of mass
| communication, the marketplace of ideas that underpins free-
| speech idealism has failed.
|
| Better ideas do not push out worse ones. And no, I'm not even
| talking about political viewpoints here - we see ideas based on
| fantasy, utter unreality, repeatedly winning substantial
| support and spreading amongst people.
|
| Conversely whenever platforms do allow totally 'free' speech,
| we see that they degenerate into hives of hate and moderate
| voices tend to leave entirely.
|
| I don't know what the answer is, but just having public forums
| made to allow everything, and screeching about free speech when
| they take a stand, is demonstrably not working.
| peytn wrote:
| One counterpoint: everyone knows that as the makers of these
| tools we have power over others. Somebody somewhere must have a
| plan to manipulate us. Personally I take whatever I read with a
| huge grain of salt and stick to time-tested principles with
| minor updates.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > I thought I believed in free speech, to the point where I
| started a company dedicated to providing privacy and
| communications products that were not subject to control by any
| central authority (that turns out to be very hard!) But
| watching the events of the past few years unfold I am no longer
| convinced that this would really make the world a better place.
|
| I've gone completely the other way. At one point my thinking
| was that private companies running these platforms weren't a
| problem as long as there wasn't a monopoly. So government
| censorship is a problem (monopoly on force), Apple and Google
| are a problem (duopoly / two "regional" monopolies) but there
| is no reason to criticize Twitter for removing anything because
| they actually have competitors.
|
| Recent events have led me to believe that removing central
| control from the distribution of information is an imperative.
|
| Because having more alternatives only matters if the
| alternatives are actually different. Uniform obsequiousness to
| the party about to be in control of the government isn't a
| marketplace of ideas.
|
| If I want to try to be ideologically consistent, there is still
| an antitrust argument to make. Uniform behavior when the
| alternative would attract a large contingent of users implies
| collusion or government censorship via capitulation to some not
| so veiled threats from legislators. But one way or another this
| is a threat to democracy.
|
| MSNBC is now arguing that Comcast et al should stop carrying
| Fox News. Comcast is the parent company of MSNBC.
|
| The answer has to be disintermediation. Which also solves the
| _real_ problem, which is centralized platforms promoting
| controversial content to increase engagement. QAnon came from
| Facebook, not Parler.
| nullifidian wrote:
| Trump has lost the election in the end - the market place of
| ideas has worked. Establishment prevented the coup --
| representative democracy has worked. No need to change
| anything. Maybe force the 1st amendment on the big tech when an
| account is verified as non-anonymous.
|
| Also the so called "existential threat" is the result of
| serious internal issues in the country. (changing demographics,
| the deindustrialization by the international capital with a
| tacit agreement of the establishment, the chasm between values
| of the educated class and the rest of the country)
| voodootrucker wrote:
| I can offer no defense of the opposing point of view right now
| in regards to purely anonymous distributed unstoppable peer-to-
| peer communication.
|
| I can offer this review of what was wrong with Parler in
| particular: https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/a-simple-thing-
| biden-can-...
|
| "In other words, we have what should be an illegal product
| barred in a way that should also be illegal, a sort of 'two
| wrongs make a right' situation."
|
| I think this is why so many of our choices seem tough right
| now: We made the wrong decision to get to present state, now
| any decision we make also looks wrong.
|
| We need to go back and rethink some things...
| millzlane wrote:
| I think free speech ends at specific threats or calls to
| violence. Call me the n word all you want. But if you threaten
| my life you should be stopped. Either by the police or by me.
|
| I think free speech is necessary, but not free speech to harass
| or threaten violence. Free speech including the vile and
| negative won't make the world a better place. Arguing against
| the bad ideas will. But I do not think it's the burden of
| society to court speech that falls in the category or
| harassment or threats of violence.
| ipsocannibal wrote:
| In this instance I don't think calls to violence are really
| the problem at hand. Specifically, what is the difference
| between getting on a box on a street corner and calling for
| the death of so and so and saying the same thing on the
| internet? The difference is the speed at which the message
| propagates and the breadth and targeting of the audience that
| hears it. The technology and its unregulated use are the
| problem not primarily the speech it facilitates. Facebook and
| Twitter in how they are designed are the problem. They are
| the equivalent of giving everyone an information machine gun
| with infinite advertising backed ammo and then asking
| everyone to abide by the honor system. We don't do this in
| the physical space and we shouldn't in the digital space. We
| are currently in the process of learning all of the old
| lessons of society building the hard way when it comes to the
| internet. Thats because Twitter and Facebook didn't intend to
| build societies they intended to make money. They did both
| but only really cared about the latter.
| [deleted]
| spamizbad wrote:
| In the United States we've always understood free speech does
| has its limits: slander/libel, "yelling fire in a crowded
| theater" -- I feel like calls for violence and genocide
| already fall well out of our boundaries of free speech. But
| it's always been understood political speech is unrestricted.
|
| I do think people have cynically exploited this understanding
| by trying to classify calls for political violence as merely
| political speech, arguing that as long as the calls for
| violence have a political angle it's free speech. And arguing
| moderating such things censorship.
| lisper wrote:
| > Call me the n word all you want. But if you threaten my
| life you should be stopped.
|
| Are you actually black? Because if you were I would think
| that you of all people would understand that calling someone
| (let's not mince words here) a nigger _is_ threatening their
| life. The problem is not so much if I call _you_ a nigger as
| if I say to my friend bubba, "Hey, what do you think we
| oughtta do 'bout that uppity nigger over there?"
| raarts wrote:
| I'm not convinced calling someone the n-word is the same as
| threatening his life for that reason.
|
| So MAGA fan would be the same as the n-word, because I can
| tell my Bubba hey what are we going to do about the MAGA
| fanboy over there.
|
| Is that threatening his life too?
| trident5000 wrote:
| Do you mean like when Kathy Griffin was holding up the
| presidents bloody head with no recourse? Or the summer riots
| which were heavily coordinated on Twitter? Twitter is still
| in the app stores. Extremism is on Twitter, Facebook, and all
| platforms, yet they came together like a mob and eliminated
| the one they didnt like.
| pstuart wrote:
| It was a stupid gesture on her part and she paid a step
| price for that act, so it wasn't so free.
|
| When talking about the riots that happened it important to
| acknowledge all the players. Most of the protesters against
| police brutality were peaceful and exercising first
| amendment rights of the first degree -- complaining about
| government abuses.
|
| There are recorded cases of agents provocateur, e.g.,
| https://www.startribune.com/police-umbrella-man-was-a-
| white-...
|
| And the police themselves were not passive in these
| regards, at least in the case when the protesters were not
| about white nationalism.
| trident5000 wrote:
| No platform recourse and they didnt even ban the
| material, even today. You could say the capital
| protestors were "mostly peaceful" as well as the vast
| majority did not storm the building. Even those on the
| capital steps were a tiny minority of who showed up. Im
| really not here to argue case by case and combat mental
| gymnastics for why one sides extremism is ok but the
| others is not. Im simply pointing out that all platforms
| have extremism and calls for violence but only one was
| banned swiftly.
| jimmydorry wrote:
| She posted it again with impunity, so it basically was
| free, seeing as she was not deplatformed after the first
| or second time doing it.
| pstuart wrote:
| She lost a lot of work over it -- therefore she did pay a
| price.
|
| As stupid and tasteless as it was, to make it into a call
| for others to cut off his head is specious at best. And
| that's a key issue in play: the _intent_ of the the
| message.
|
| You're engaging in weak whataboutism.
| travisporter wrote:
| Yes, I agree. Iran's supreme leader is still on twitter.
| But a counterpoint is that that ISIS was driven out of
| twitter and FB systematically. Correct me but you're
| implying in your statement is they "eliminated the one they
| didn't like [because of political views]" but that's not
| necessarily the only reason
|
| EDIT: Given your other responses, we're at an impasse.
| Bowing out.
| trident5000 wrote:
| I forgot the other reason: to give a gift to the new
| party in power in hopes of stopping the anti-trust cases.
| The dems were nudging some of them, ill be interested to
| see if we get a magical 180 degree turn.
| [deleted]
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| What do you do when people simply want to spew emotional
| tirades and mindlessly copy memes, and won't argue in good or
| any faith? What is that worth really?
| millzlane wrote:
| You bring up a good point. I don't engage with folks like
| that. I assume they're already indoctrinated or an
| influencer from outside of the country or a troll. If I'm
| feeling empathetic I might try to appeal to the human in
| them.
|
| Edit: If you're asking me as if I were the host of the free
| speech platform. I guess I would allow everything except
| anything that violated criminal law. And would keep a law
| firm on retainer to field complaints and give the final say
| to our legal department. It's a tough question.
| jariel wrote:
| It doesn't matter who you engage with.
|
| If 10% of Americans are convinced that QAnon is behind
| the scenes running the show, and they believe that, and
| act on it in a variety of ways, then it's a huge problem.
|
| I suggest with the election, COVID and QAnon together we
| are probably already feeling the results of mass
| misinformation.
|
| It's an ugly problem because none of us really want to
| suppress people for saying something not technically
| true. I mean, who doesn't like a good alien conspiracy
| theory? Until it gets out of hand ...
| jennyyang wrote:
| That's their right to spew whatever they want. Just because
| it's worthless doesn't mean we should stop it. I personally
| think every single conversation in Twitter is absolutely
| worthless, maybe even has negative value. Does that give me
| the right to shut down Twitter? No. I value free speech so
| if people want to waste their time spewing nonsense, that
| is their right.
| ipsocannibal wrote:
| I think this point of view neglects the emergent
| properties of a society where millions of people can spew
| nonsense all at once, at the speed of light, using AI
| assisted audience targeting. Crackpots and liars have
| existed since the beginning of time but never before has
| a technology been designed to so readily amplify and
| reenforce their nonsense. Never before has a technology
| been so adept at hiding from you that the speaker is a
| crackpot or liar.
| netizen-9748 wrote:
| I think the issue is rather the visibility of the
| nonsense, as a global species we are still adapting to
| this new communication medium
| kiba wrote:
| This is because we use 'votes' and 'likes' along with
| non-transparent algorithms to amplify certain voices over
| other.
|
| Nothing to do with the medium, but how we structure
| social media.
| meheleventyone wrote:
| It's not even just the visibility, it's the direct harm
| the actions of these people cause. Whether it's to their
| own personal relationships or nation states. QAnon should
| make a lot of people nervous about the state of
| unfettered free speech and the idea that the counter to
| bad ideas is more speech.
| Nursie wrote:
| No, it's twitter's right to carry it or not. AFAICT
| there's no right to tweet.
| ardy42 wrote:
| > I think free speech ends at specific threats or calls to
| violence. Call me the n word all you want. But if you
| threaten my life you should be stopped. Either by the police
| or by me.
|
| Then what about lies? The real problem of the last few years
| is that really blatant lies have been remarkably successful
| in the "marketplace of ideas" and quite hard to effectively
| argue against (if you disagree, try using facts and reason to
| convince a QAnon believer that the world _isn 't_ run by
| Satan-worshipping pedophile Democrats who Trump & Muller are
| secretly preparing to defeat in a blaze of glory). Those lies
| are fuel for those "specific threats or calls to violence."
|
| I think a lot of the conventional beliefs around free speech
| make assumptions that may not be as true now as they were in
| the past (e.g. most of the participants will act in good
| faith (or at least have some shame) and act reasonably, and
| that any participants that don't will be quickly identified
| and ostracized). The error is sort of like classical
| economics theories incorrectly assuming people will be
| rational economic actors when they often aren't.
| honest_guy wrote:
| And what of the lies which led us into the Gulf War and the
| Iraq War? Hundreds of thousands of people are dead because
| of those lies, and they were broadcast from coast to coast
| by every credible news media organisation in existence. The
| same organisations now being lauded as the bearers of
| ultimate truth.
|
| When the next set of lies is rolled out to land us in
| another unending conflict, I would quite like the internet
| to be a place where information can freely flow. My fear of
| governments is far greater than my fear of kooky people on
| the internet.
| jariel wrote:
| 'Threats of violence'
|
| 'Threats of coordinated violence'
|
| 'Satire with violence'
|
| Are all part of a type of information wherein we can make
| rules and try to apply them fairly.
|
| Saying 'Twitter allowed this but not that' is besides the
| point - it illustrates that Twitter is either inconsistent
| or hypocritical or both ... but it doesn't abnegate the
| notion that policies can be crudely made to work.
|
| If you straight up threatened to murder someone on Twitter,
| they'll take it down.
|
| The problem of 'mass mistruth' is much more complicated,
| because of course, making the stupid claim that 'the COVID
| vaccines kill 50% of it's recipients' probably would
| normally be within the realm of protected speech - but when
| 100% of Americans are subject to such lies, 25% of them
| refuse to take the vaccine, and 5% of them want to get
| violent an overthrow the CDC & murder Fauci because he's
| 'killing children' - well it becomes a problem.
|
| One key thing to understand that nobody here in HN wants to
| contemplate is that the 'commons' is utterly not a clearing
| house of information wherein the truth rises to the top.
| This is totally the opposite. The commons is an arena of
| populism where we plebes act on instinct and emotion, we
| chose the information we want to hear, we buy into the lies
| of groups and ideologues.
|
| The truth is almost irrelevant, because it can only ever be
| contemplated in the context of legitimate authority, which
| is why we 'mostly trust' the CDC, Homeland Security, our
| Judicial system etc. etc..
|
| 'Coordinating Violence' is a problem that can be dealt with
| in all but the eyes of those wanting 'absolute free
| speech'.
|
| But 'Lies and Misinformation' we must understand is
| actually a serious problem, and worse, there's no clear
| path to how we can solve this.
|
| There's no doubt we don't want corporations, and not 'Tim
| Cook' making these decisions, probably not individual
| bureaucrats or ideological politicians ... we're all going
| to have to work hard to find something that works and that
| is fairly transparent and fair. FYI Apple doesn't want the
| headache of deciding who speaks and not - they just want to
| make money and not get into risky scenarios.
| jmull wrote:
| We _do_ have some limits on lies. There are libel /slander
| laws.
|
| These limits are usually very weak, though. They vary from
| place to place, but tend to have a high bar, are expensive
| to pursue, and have many exceptions.
| slg wrote:
| Furthermore these laws almost exclusively apply when
| speaking about specific people. QAnon people can be sued
| if they say "Hillary Clinton drinks the blood of
| children". However they are safe saying "Democrats drink
| the blood of children." I don't understand why these two
| should be treated differently from a moral, ethical, or
| legal perspective.
|
| Also these are largely viewed as civil issues and not
| criminal so Hillary Clinton needs to take them to court
| and not the State. These two issues combined basically
| give Americans free rein to make up whatever lies they
| want about whatever group they wish to defame.
| glogla wrote:
| Those don't cover other dangerous types of lies, like
| telling people drinking bleach will protect them from
| COVID, or telling them COVID is a hoax and they shouldn't
| wear masks, or the whole antivax thing.
| dawnerd wrote:
| We could help limit this by more aggressively labeling
| untrustworthy news sources and better bot spam detection. I
| don't think we should necessarily ban lies as that is
| really tricky to even enforce, but stopping those rumors
| and conspiracies from the source would go a long ways.
|
| Plus this would allow satire sites to still function, just
| tag their links with a notice saying something like "this
| tweet links to a satire website".
| dukeofdoom wrote:
| Should we ban hyperbolic exaggerations? phrasing things in
| way that makes it seem like its a Biblical battle between
| good and evil, should be allowed in my opinion. I think its
| questionable how many literally belief in those things. But
| exaggerating things has been part of story telling forever.
|
| Its also not that off to call someone a witch, that
| literally brags about staying youthful by applying a cream
| made from baby foreskins.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BY2aOHQlAco
|
| And referencing Epstein island, which many elites did go
| to, is not really a conspiracy theory anymore. Its a
| documented fact.
| edbob wrote:
| What is "a credible existential threat to civilization" to you?
| The recent riots seem to be more than adequately handled
| through existing law enforcement procedures. Obviously the
| police can't prevent every crime, but in this case
| investigation and prosecution seems to be enough to remove bad
| actors. We know what the consequences of free speech are, and
| even if the downsides are amplified 1000x by its enemies, the
| downsides are still manageable by existing institutions.
|
| What are the known consequences of not having free speech? Is
| there a large country where this hasn't resulted in the death
| and/or oppression of millions? Even Mao's China had the
| Cultural Revolution, which was more destructive than the BLM
| and Capitol riots combined. Clearly not having free speech
| prevents neither civil unrest nor insurrection against the
| lawful authorities.
|
| If you're looking for a dream solution where the world becomes
| great, than free speech will never get you there. You will
| probably be attracted to the unproven promises of some ideology
| or another due to lack of alternatives. If you're looking for a
| comparison of real-world consequences where one imperfect
| solution outperforms another, then so far free speech has yet
| to produce a Holocaust, a Holodomor, or a Three Years of Great
| Famine. The lack of free speech has.
| lisper wrote:
| > What is "a credible existential threat to civilization" to
| you?
|
| For example: a delusional or demagogic leader who promulgates
| lies about the outcome of an election in order to fire up a
| mob and incite them to attempt to violently take over the
| seat of government of a country with nuclear weapons.
|
| Not that such a thing would ever actually happen. I guess I'm
| just a worrier.
| edbob wrote:
| What's the worst-case scenario if they had succeeded? That
| they take some people hostage and have a stand-off until
| the FBI takes them down? There was no path to them
| attaining any actual power. Their actions were violent and
| bad, but had no actual effect on anybody outside of D.C.
| That is not what I call an "existential threat".
|
| Again, you have to compare the downsides of free speech vs
| the downsides of censorship. If you only look at the cons
| of free speech, then of course you will hate it. But if you
| compare one impotent riot to the tens of millions dead as a
| result of suppression, then free speech seems much more
| valuable.
| alwayseasy wrote:
| The worst-case scenario is the end of democracy in the
| USA in the next 15 years.
|
| If one side stays convinced the elections were fraudulent
| and Trump is a victim , it will cause a permanent shift
| in how Americans see their own democratic elections.
|
| Historically, since democracy has existed, that vacuum is
| always filled by an authoritarian leader.
| jimmygrapes wrote:
| I find it odd that most of this could have been prevented
| if just one judge had said "you know what, you have a lot
| of notarized affidavits, and a reasonable claim to harm
| considering you lost the election by conventional wisdom,
| and you can't legally access any further data to prove
| your case unless we enter a discovery stage, so, sure,
| let's play this out and be done with it."
|
| I also find it odd that none of the lawsuits prevented
| combined the affidavits (generally considered sufficient
| evidence to proceed) and reasonable proof of harm. Always
| one or the other (or neither).
| alwayseasy wrote:
| Or maybe the legal team lied to the public and were
| truthful to the 50 different judges?
| antibuddy wrote:
| However, what if the election really was fraudulent? I
| mean the video in Georgia after the election observer
| were sent home, were pretty incriminating.
|
| Also seeing how BLM got backing and did way more damage,
| makes this all look pretty one-sided. It's only okay if
| they do it.
| alwayseasy wrote:
| Interestingly, the democrats would have fixed the
| elections but only managed to win the Senate in a tight
| run-off?
|
| After spending $100 million, the Trump campaign's legal
| team found no admissible evidence of election fraud, just
| videos they can use for future campaigns attacking
| democracy.
| edbob wrote:
| Nothing will pour more gas on that fire than censorship.
|
| I basically agree with your analysis on that point, and
| I'm resentful of Trump for helping to create that
| problem. But I consider big tech censorship to be the
| first step to an inevitable end of democracy, "destroying
| it in order to save it".
| alwayseasy wrote:
| It's a really hard problem because the "anti-censorship"
| argument is also used by the side that wants to destroy
| democracy once in power.
|
| Historically, Americans have succeeded at destroying
| ideologies by grossly impeding on free speech and other
| constitutional rights when there was political will.
|
| Currently, I'm not sure there is a sign of political will
| to restore democratic norms by suppressing white-
| supremacism.
| baggy_trough wrote:
| I would think assassinations.
| edbob wrote:
| That would be very bad if it happened, although existing
| institutions proved sufficient to prevent this.
|
| Still, we've had many assassinations in our history,
| often at the presidential level. None of them were
| "existential threats". They were all handled by existing
| institutions and did not require throwing out our core
| values.
| lisper wrote:
| > There was no path to them attaining any actual power.
|
| They currently _have_ actual power. Their leader is
| currently the president of the United States. For the
| next 48 hours he could nuke Tehran if he wanted to.
|
| And what actually happened is _far_ from the worst-case
| scenario. Imagine a comparable mob, but well organized,
| and armed with assault rifles. That was (and remains) a
| real possibility.
| edbob wrote:
| You seem determined to focus only on the worst possible
| hypothetical downsides and not consider anything else. Of
| course in this case free speech will prove to be an evil
| that must be eliminated. You win.
| caseysoftware wrote:
| > _fire up a mob and incite them to attempt to violently
| take over the seat of government of a country with nuclear
| weapons_
|
| You know the buttons/switches/etc to launch missiles
| (nuclear or not) are _not_ at the Speaker 's podium in the
| House, right?
|
| In fact, "taking over the seat of government" here was
| literally just that.. a physical seat. The US government
| applies authority in people via roles not via seating
| position.
|
| Were they a bunch of assholes? Yes and they should be
| prosecuted as such.
|
| Was it a "violent take over"? Not a chance.
| jariel wrote:
| "Was it a "violent take over"? Not a chance"
|
| Sure it was.
|
| This is how a 'coup' works - the objective is not to
| 'take control of the country' by force, but of the
| political system.
|
| If that violent mob was successful in 'stopping the
| count' - then it very seriously threatens the legitimacy
| of Biden being president.
|
| Why do you think that Congress _reconvened right after
| the violence_ and very quickly pushed through the vote?
| And didn 't wait a few days?
|
| If the vote confirmation doesn't take place, someone
| takes the case to SCOTUS wherein they might rule the
| process was not complete and 'now you have two
| Presidents' - and very ugly ambiguous situation that
| could spiral out of control very quickly.
|
| The fact that SCOTUS could have ruled 'incomplete
| process' may embolden millions of 'hard
| Constitutionalists' to one side.
|
| This stuff happens all over the world, all the time.
| These things are fragile.
|
| It was a nice little lesson in how actually fragile 'even
| the USA is' and that this is serious stuff.
| dralley wrote:
| >What is "a credible existential threat to civilization" to
| you? The recent riots seem to be more than adequately handled
| through existing law enforcement procedures.
|
| The crowd (who had previously been chanting "hang Mike
| Pence") came within about 30 seconds of being face to face
| with Vice President Pence and some large fraction of Congress
| (source [0]). They came very close to being overrun before
| the building was evacuated.
|
| We can't know what would have happened. But we know what
| might have happened. And it very nearly could have happened.
|
| I'm not ready to call that "more than adequately handled".
|
| [0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/pence-rioters-
| capito...
| yissp wrote:
| Law enforcement has been failing to take the threat of
| right-wing extremism seriously for a long time. I think
| that's what we should be focused on addressing instead of
| clamping down on speech. The situation at the capitol
| should never have been allowed to escalate to the point
| that it did.
| edbob wrote:
| For context, I don't expect any government to be able to
| prevent violence and conflict. The best we can hope for is
| to keep conflict to a manageable level. We've had numerous
| assassinations in this country in the past, and it held
| together. The threat of a possible assassination of a
| right-wing figure absolutely does not rise to the level of
| "existential threat". If you don't want to call it
| "adequately handled", fine, I'm not going to argue those
| semantic distinctions especially as it's not necessary for
| us to have the same perspectives here. I'm just saying that
| society is still intact, and would still be intact even if
| Mike Pence had been attacked.
|
| Other than the personal tragedy to Pence and his family,
| the worst outcome of an assassination would be people
| struggling to reconcile their ecstatic glee that Pence had
| keen killed with their furious rage that right-wingers
| attacked someone. If anything, division and conflict within
| the Republican Party only seems to strengthen their
| opposition. These events lead to less power held by the
| right, not more. Republicans shooting themselves in the
| foot is not an "existential threat to civilization".
| antibuddy wrote:
| My first instinct is to think, that you never believed in free
| speech in the first place, however I'd like to hear some
| examples of what shook you to the core.
| quacker wrote:
| > But we've now done the experiment in a big way and the
| results seem overwhelmingly negative to me, to the point where
| they present a credible existential threat to civilization, on
| a par with climate change.
|
| Free speech is certainly a double-edged sword. For example,
| would you be comfortable running a large site on which users
| spread misinformation about climate change? Would you continue
| allowing that misinformation?
|
| It's a pretty hard question for me personally.
|
| (Practically speaking, you might seek to redirect profits from
| that misinformation toward donations that help combat climate
| change, or something similar to offset the impact of that
| misinformation.)
| peytn wrote:
| I'd be fine with that. Climate change is hard enough that I
| don't think banning dissent and reinforcing groupthink is
| gonna get us to a good place. We should think about designing
| better solutions and incentives to adhere to those solutions
| instead. Banning misinformation won't cure the desire not to
| go along with a plan. It just kicks problems with aligning
| incentives down the road.
| threatofrain wrote:
| It's up to every democracy to decide the limits of any
| freedom. Germany bans Nazi symbols, communications, and
| organizations altogether, and it doesn't appear as if their
| state is suffering.
|
| Also, Apple and Android ban porn, which is basically an
| entire industry.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| Honestly I think the legal status quo is pretty close to ideal:
| governments may not limit speech, but platforms can clamp down
| on anything they want. The only problem with the platforms is
| that they still somewhat cling to the idea that they won't
| censor speech, which is frankly ridiculous. Of course they will
| censor, they should just admit it and clamp down any speech
| they find abhorrent. Allow the marketplace (and marketplace of
| ideas) to work.
| sojournerc wrote:
| What about DNS? ISP?
|
| There must be some line. Sure you can build your own server
| and connect it to the internet, but if you're handing out
| cards with an IP address, marketability is limited.
| pbourke wrote:
| The status quo has brought us to today. The platforms only
| act when they see that the political winds have shifted.
| There were precisely zero "profiles in courage" among the
| platforms until after the election. We can expect nothing
| more - they're businesses beholden to investors and
| regulators above all else.
| MrPatan wrote:
| What happens when nobody is allowed to talk you down from this
| position?
| gpm wrote:
| I think "free speech" is not quite as simple as a single
| concept.
|
| Despite how it's often portrayed, Parler was not hosting
| uncensored speech, on the contrary it was a heavily moderated
| platform controlling for a certain set of speech.
|
| I'm not convinced that this example (really _any_ of the
| examples of speech surrounding Trump) are actually
| representative samples of what private communications products
| not subject to control by any central authority looks like.
|
| There is still someone that was exercising free uncensored
| speech here (under the american 1st amendment definition) - but
| that person is the person running Parler, and not the users.
| What we observed with this deplatforming was one set of
| platforms with _relatively_ little censorship (though a fair
| bit in absolute terms) stop supporting a sub-platform with a
| _lot_ of censorship.
|
| One lesson I would take away from this is that enabling
| platforms on which censorship is performed by a third party not
| under your control can be scary. The amount of damage bad-faith
| moderation/censorship can do was surprisingly (to me) high - I
| would have thought people would notice and reject it more
| strongly. Uncensored platforms for speech might also be scary,
| but I don't think Trump gives much evidence for it (sites like
| 4-chan might, I don't really know).
|
| Another lesson I would take away from reddit's handling of
| Trump (in general) is that manipulation of algorithmic content
| discovery can do a lot of damage. There we saw that happening
| with things like bots upvoting (as well as bad faith
| moderation), but I think the pattern is more general. If you
| can choose what people are looking at, especially if you can
| convince them that it's "organic content", it can do a lot of
| damage. I'm told that similar issues with Facebook/Youtube
| content discovery existed as well, but I don't have first hand
| experience with those issues (youtube tends to recommend random
| technical and rocket related content to me, and I barely use
| facebook).
|
| Whether those lessons are "anti free speech" - well that's up
| to your definition of free speech. I don't think they are under
| my definition, but I think they are under the US constitutions
| definition.
| Consultant32452 wrote:
| I don't think there's a credible threat to civilization, but
| perhaps a credible threat to our prevailing thoughts on
| governance.
|
| There is no good justification that the people of Los Angeles
| should have to live under the rules and cultural customs of
| Mobile Alabama. Nor should the people of Mobile Alabama be
| forced to live under the rules and cultural norms of Los
| Angeles. As long as we re forced to toggle back and forth
| between which group is forcing the other to live under their
| own preferences there cannot be peace.
|
| The separation you are seeing is real, but it's not negative.
| The path forward is more freedom, perhaps even separation.
| cousin_it wrote:
| It's a pretty dark path then. There aren't many examples of
| countries separating peacefully.
| GrifMD wrote:
| I know it's a video game, but I really think Hideo Kojima
| nailed it in MGS2 (2001):
|
| https://youtu.be/C31XYgr8gp0?t=99
|
| Or the transcript: https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/95454286
| imglorp wrote:
| We're also at the point now where you have to ask _which_ cloud
| is deplatforming a site. (edit, and their state alignment)
|
| Case in point, Russia is now routing Parler traffic.
|
| https://twitter.com/VickerySec/status/1351227537985318929?s=...
|
| https://twitter.com/dtemkin/status/1351240721261584385?s=20
| (edit)
| AzzieElbab wrote:
| I have no doubt in my mind that the violence would have been much
| worse had Trump won, and while I am happy we bid the bullet, I
| can't help wondering how tech and media would have responded.
| voodootrucker wrote:
| Wow, why did this fall off the front page? There's no way it
| wasn't being upvoted sufficiently watching the flurry of initial
| comments...
|
| Was this discussion blocked? And if so, is there a particular
| policy it violated? This discussion seems extremely important
| right now.
|
| @dang can you elaborate?
| dang wrote:
| We can't answer questions we don't see, and the only reliable
| way to get a message to us is hn@ycombinator.com. This is in
| the site guidelines:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. I only saw
| this one randomly.
|
| Pilfer got it right. I've turned the penalty off now.
| Pilfer wrote:
| Looks like it triggered the flamewar detector. This usually
| happens if a post has more comments than votes, and the post
| did not reach the minimum threshold (40 points).
| voodootrucker wrote:
| Thanks, I never realized that existed.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| I call bollocks on this. Everyone whose business goes against the
| terms of service of the major three cloud providers (in the case
| of Parler, serving as a platform for calls to violence and
| sedition, which are _criminal offenses_ ) still has the freedom
| to go to any of the literally _hundreds_ of "bullet-proof
| hosting" providers, to rent rack space and a fiber uplink
| somewhere and to place one's own bare metal hardware there.
|
| The only thing Parler lost is the convenience that cloud
| providers offer, but there's no constitutional right to
| convenience.
| mrstone wrote:
| I completely agree with this - why is freedom of speech even
| coming up? You couldn't say this stuff in real life on a street
| corner, why should it be protected online?
| sleepysysadmin wrote:
| >I completely agree with this - why is freedom of speech even
| coming up? You couldn't say this stuff in real life on a
| street corner, why should it be protected online?
|
| Because the platform was not 100% about violence.
|
| Do you think it would be impossible to find threats of
| violence on twitter? How many twitter accounts say "kill
| trump" as their name? https://twitter.com/kill_trump_rn
|
| Finding examples of threats of violence is not difficult
| regardless of platform.
|
| If deplatforming only requires finding say 100 cases of
| inciting violence. Which is all Amazon ever found. Then to
| silence your political opponents requires nothing more than
| getting on their platform together to threaten violence. Your
| political opponents become silenced and must find a new
| platform. Rinse repeat.
| mrstone wrote:
| Yeah I think the difference is that twitter will take
| action against people who issue credible threats. Parler
| explicitly did not, in the name of "free speech".
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > why is freedom of speech even coming up?
|
| The wider context of the debate is the thing, IMO. Prior to
| the Internet, exchange of opinions used to be locally
| restricted - now with the Internet, we have a couple of
| clashes.
|
| The most obvious is that the US model of "free speech" is
| almost absolute, whereas European societies believe that some
| forms of speech (esp. calls to violence, Holocaust denial,
| Nazi imagery) should be banned to protect society and its
| minorities from the worst. I'm German, given the history of
| what my ancestors did I'm firmly on the latter camp.
|
| The second one, related to that, is that social networks are,
| for about the first time in human history, _truly global_ ,
| and it's not in the clear at all who should / could claim
| legal authority over what happens there. When a person denies
| the Holocaust, Twitter can ban them, they can refuse to do
| anything or they can place a German-wide ban (per the NetzDG
| law). On the other side, when a German woman posts a photo of
| herself topless on Facebook, that is perfectly fine by German
| law but risks heavy fines for Facebook in the US, so Facebook
| errs on deleting stuff.
|
| And the third and final clash is STBX President Trump: should
| a private company have the power to take away the capability
| of a sitting US president to communicate efficiently with his
| citizens? Should a President (or any other political figure)
| be allowed to "govern by Tweet" in the first place? Is a call
| for violence, even for genocide (Iran's Khamenei comes to
| mind), acceptable simply because its caller is a government
| leader?
| evantahler wrote:
| I would like to see a new class of "social libel" laws - whereby
| knowing telling lies as truth in a public forum were punishable.
| Is this a civil or criminal offense?
| breckenedge wrote:
| It's still plain ole libel or defamation. Musk was sued for
| defamation on Twitter not too long ago.
| lixtra wrote:
| Which politician would pass such a law? Only the one that has
| very tight control over the judges that execute it.
| jtdev wrote:
| I fail to see how pushing the most extreme speech into the
| shadows improves anything...
| aaccount wrote:
| Also the sorry state of tech skills in tech companies
| cccc4all wrote:
| This should give pause to every companies using only the cloud,
| especially from single cloud company. It is single point of
| failure and it's under someone else's control.
|
| Are they comfortable giving that kind of power to another
| company? Maybe a competitor?
| thefounder wrote:
| Just make sure you dont use proprietary stuff (e.g Google
| datastore/firebase etc) and at least you have the chance to go
| the old fashion way(co-location, smaller hosta etc)
| api wrote:
| If I were running something likely to be deplatformed, I would
| never consider anything but a multi-cloud solution where no
| single provider is a single point of failure.
|
| It's not that hard to do.
| zarkov99 wrote:
| Hindsight and all that. Parler has hosted content no worse than
| Twitter or Facebook or thousands of other sites. Their banning
| from AWS could not have been reasonably anticipated. It was an
| unprecedented act of censorship in response to an unprecedented
| moment in American history. The world will learn and AWS will
| likely loose a few customers though not enough to change its
| policies.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > Parler has hosted content no worse than Twitter or Facebook
| or thousands of other sites.
|
| I disagree. There were open calls for murder on the platform
| where Parler was notified by Apple, by Google, by Amazon -
| and _nothing happened_. Which is the key thing here.
|
| Twitter and Facebook are extremely fast with the ban-hammer,
| in contrast.
| imwillofficial wrote:
| This is not true. Not even close.
| cbg0 wrote:
| https://www.theverge.com/2021/1/13/22228675/amazon-
| parler-ta...
| ogre_codes wrote:
| Amazon has this documented extensively in their court
| filings.
| ogre_codes wrote:
| > Twitter and Facebook are extremely fast with the ban-
| hammer, in contrast.
|
| Twitter and Facebook have recently grudgingly picked up the
| ban hammer and use it, often too late or ineffectively. But
| yes, they will eventually act which is the big difference.
| ogre_codes wrote:
| > Parler has hosted content no worse than Twitter or Facebook
| or thousands of other sites.
|
| Nonsense.
|
| Parler was created because Twitter and Facebook were
| moderating content. If Twitter and Facebook hadn't been
| moderating hate speech, Parler would not exist. Posting
| voices and content which is banned on Twitter and Facebook is
| the single unique "Feature" of Parler.
|
| Over the months, Amazon has been in contact with Parler's
| management about moderating violent content and speech.
|
| Facebook and Twitter have hosted content which incites
| violence and hate speech, but it's far less common and they
| make (often grudging and half assed) efforts to remove it. On
| Parler, it's accepted, arguably encouraged.
| slcjordan wrote:
| Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't some of the Parler
| violent content and speech that violated the TOS still on
| Twitter in the form of screenshots? Or have there been
| efforts by big tech to remove them too?
| the_drunkard wrote:
| > Parler was created because Twitter and Facebook were
| moderating content.
|
| > If Twitter and Facebook hadn't been moderating hate
| speech, Parler would not exist.
|
| I don't think it's fair to claim Parler was created because
| Twitter and Facebook moderate hate speech. For example, the
| Hunter Biden story was actively suppressed on both Twitter
| and Facebook, essentially confirming long-held beliefs that
| social media platforms curate based on political ideology.
| matchbok wrote:
| Only if you choose to think it's based on ideology. Fact
| is, 90% of the top links on FB are right-wing nonsense
| and conspiracy theories. Doesn't sound like curation to
| me.
| goatinaboat wrote:
| _For example, the Hunter Biden story was actively
| suppressed on both Twitter and Facebook, essentially
| confirming long-held beliefs that social media platforms
| curate based on political ideology._
|
| I don't think anyone can in good faith deny that if Don
| Trump Jr had allegedly done one-tenth of what Hunter
| Biden is accused of, the media would have it on 24/7
| rotation.
| dlp211 wrote:
| Yes, because doing something and being accused of
| something don't meet the same bar of evidence.
|
| Meanwhile, the Trump and children have been a Masterclass
| of nepotism and corruption. Let me know when one of
| Biden's children become an Aide to the President or put
| in charge of pandemic response, middle east peace,
| federal government reform, or the dozen other things
| Javanka was put in charge of despite being absolutely
| ignorant and unqualified in those topics.
| jimmygrapes wrote:
| Not gonna disagree too much because the nepotism bothered
| me too, but you absolutely cannot deny the progress Jared
| Kushner made in his role of coordinating ME peace
| agreements.
| ogre_codes wrote:
| Twitter and Facebook both have done a horrible job
| moderating hate speech. Both in terms of over-moderating
| in some places and under-moderating in others.
|
| But they _actually moderate their content_ , and while
| there have been a few knee jerk reactions, they've mostly
| erred on the side of leaving things up rather than the
| reverse.
|
| Parler has knowingly left threats of rape, murder, and
| torture on their site indefinitely. The contrast is stark
| here.
| zarkov99 wrote:
| I think you are mis-informed here, or perhaps your
| definition of hate speech is different from mine. Parler
| was created because there was a perception that the
| moderation at Twitter was heavily slanted against
| conservatives. Many respectable people joined Parler,
| though, again perhaps we have different definitions of
| respectable. Parler has a moderation mechanism which is
| manual, not automatic as in Twitter, and like everybody
| else they ban hate speech, though perhaps not quite as
| fast.
|
| What likely happened is that Amazon/Google/Apple did not
| want the risk of being accused as enablers if Trump managed
| to get on Parler and they decided to pre-preemptively cut
| Parler loose. Since in this day an age no one gets fired
| for canceling conservatives it was a winning move no matter
| what.
| ogre_codes wrote:
| > I think you are mis-informed here, or perhaps your
| definition of hate speech is different from mine.
|
| My issues with Parler are pretty much in line with what
| Amazon lays out in their court filing against Parler.
|
| > "This case is about Parler's demonstrated unwillingness
| and inability to remove from the servers of Amazon Web
| Services ('AWS') content that threatens the public
| safety," Amazon wrote, "such as by _inciting and planning
| the rape, torture, and assassination_ of named public
| officials and private citizens. "
|
| https://deadline.com/2021/01/amazon-court-filing-parler-
| for-...
|
| Maybe you think " _inciting and planning the rape,
| torture, and assassination_... " is an Ok sort of thing
| for public discourse. That kind of speech is banned here
| on HN, and as I suggested, nearly every other public
| discussion group.
| matchbok wrote:
| Nobody censors conservatives. Hate speech is censored.
|
| The fact that most conspiracy theories, hate speech, and
| violence comes from the right is not our problem. It's
| not "censorship".
| Traubenfuchs wrote:
| Multicloud? The cool kids call it polynimbus.
| threatofrain wrote:
| According to the CEO of Parler, banks and payment vendors, law
| firms, text and mail services also cancelled on them. This is
| why Parler also motivates discussion of alternative currency.
| daniellarusso wrote:
| What is the product?
|
| What do they take payment for?
| kondro wrote:
| I'm not going to go into all the reasons why a multi-cloud
| solution probably isn't and why multi-cloud is stupendously
| difficult (and expensive as you move all that data around) for
| a scaling business.
|
| But in a situation like this, a company that's likely to be
| deplatformed, is likely to be deplatformed _everywhere_. I 've
| seen a screenshot recently of Parler's hardware requirements
| (when searching new vendors) and it's somewhere in the vicinity
| of 15,000 cores with more than 400Gbps (sustained) of internal
| and 100Gbps of external bandwidth (from memory).
|
| The big cloud providers are the _only_ place you can move to
| when you have those types of requirements (and are still
| actively growing).
| api wrote:
| That's about 250 bare metal 64-core servers. You can get that
| elsewhere, and keep in mind per-core performance on bare
| metal is going to be higher than you get per-core on shared
| tenant VMs in the cloud (for several reasons). Those
| bandwidth needs would constrain you only to larger scale bare
| metal providers though, which would leave you with fewer
| options.
|
| The problem sounds like it would have been database sync
| between locations, which is a major issue in multi-cloud.
| Most replicated databases are pretty chatty.
|
| You're right though about deplatforming, and the problem is
| if you are providing a safe haven for a bunch of Nazis like
| Parler is you are going to be constantly DDOSed. That means
| you need a lot of DDOS protection, and high end DDOS
| protection is a significantly smaller market with fewer
| players than just raw rack-em-and-stack-em hosting.
| andomar wrote:
| If you were refused by Amazon, Microsoft, Google and
| Cloudflare, what alternatives are there?
| justapassenger wrote:
| 10 years ago no one was running in cloud. Internet still
| works outside of big tech data centers.
| jasonjayr wrote:
| Sure, but frequently whole netblocks we blocked because
| spammers or IP ranges hosting + sending content undesired
| by the larger community.
|
| Peering ISPs would frequently drop routes + messages from
| whole data centers that would blatantly ignore spam
| complaints, which would force their hand to kick the
| offending customers off their platforms that caused harm to
| their other non-offending customers.
| shiftpgdn wrote:
| There are thousands of colo centers out there that will take
| your business. Sure you have to buy the hardware up front but
| in the long run it'll be less expensive. The scary part would
| be fiber/backbone providers denying you a connection.
| drivingmenuts wrote:
| Ultimately, this will come down to public vs. private
| rights. If infrastructure, no matter how vital, is
| privately funded, what rights are there vs infrastructure
| that is publicly funded. Further complications are
| infrastructure that is a mix of the two.
|
| Personally, I lean toward private infrastructure being able
| to set their own rules and if it's public, then the public
| sets the rules. I am not sure when it gets to be a mix of
| the two.
| shiftpgdn wrote:
| What about peering agreements? What happens when cogent
| gets de-peered because they host a website accused of
| thought crimes?
| drivingmenuts wrote:
| The same thing that would happen in other situations. If
| you and I can't come to terms, we part ways and don't do
| business with each other. If one of us is affected
| because of that, then one of us needs to reconsider how
| best to remedy or work around that issue.
| bdcravens wrote:
| Investing in all the infrastructure to build a globally
| distributed architecture that is resilient? It's almost like
| we forgot that the web existed before the big cloud vendors.
|
| https://techcrunch.com/2012/10/20/facebooks-first-server-
| cos...
| gameswithgo wrote:
| epik, apparently.
|
| at some point too when you notice that _everyone_ thinks you
| are horrible maybe the problem is you.
| zarkov99 wrote:
| Yeah, that is a great mental heuristic: the majority is
| _always_ fair and right. I am sure the Jews thought that
| back in 1930's Germany. And the Christians in Rome, the
| Kolacks in Russia, the intellectuals in Mao 's China, the
| wealthy Cubans when Castro took over and blacks in the US
| before the civil rights movement.
| klyrs wrote:
| False equivalence. Freedom to persecute is not equal to
| freedom from persecution.
| zarkov99 wrote:
| The equivalence is not in the persecution but on the
| validity of an heuristic that that dictates you are an
| asshole if a powerful majority says you are.
| yanderekko wrote:
| You grant too much. The people who are making these
| deplatforming decisions do not represent a majority or
| anything close to it. Perhaps they believe they will when
| their cultural revolution is complete and the dust has
| settled, but that has yet to be seen.
| zarkov99 wrote:
| Unfortunately they do represent an overwhelming majority
| of the power in this particular domain.
| imwillofficial wrote:
| I see Facebook getting right on that.
| j_walter wrote:
| Not everyone thinks they are horrible, and for the many
| that do they are relying on the media saying that they
| played a part in the Capitol riots. I haven't actually seen
| any data showing what was posted on Parler or what evidence
| was used to justify shutting them down.
|
| Don't forget...just because everyone thinks something is
| good, doesn't mean that everyone isn't wrong. Hitler was
| Time magazine's man of the year...less than a year before
| he started WW2.
| yanderekko wrote:
| Very few people are hand-wringing over the nonavailability
| of large child pornography sites and such. The problem is
| that not everyone has to believe you're horrible to get you
| booted off the internet - you just have to become
| sufficiently vile to a narrow, highly-polarized elite
| strata of society.
|
| The NYT did not apologize for printing Tom Cotton's op-ed
| because it was outside of a broad Overton Window, but
| because it's a captured institution. A lot of tech firms
| face similar issues, whereby trying to hobble the speech
| channels of political enemies (even those with very broad
| support) is not only seen as acceptable but morally
| necessary.
| nixgeek wrote:
| Oracle, IBM, Alibaba.
|
| On the smaller but still "millions of virtual machines" end
| of the scale: DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode. Still have APIs
| and can give you instances in minutes.
|
| Hetzner and OVH also an option for the scale of
| infrastructure that Parler appears to require, although their
| "Dedicated Server" offerings (Bare Metal) often take 24-72
| hours to deliver to customers.
|
| Or one of a thousand places to rent a rack and "DIY" with
| hardware from a vendor like Dell, HP, Supermicro, Lenovo, ZT,
| ...
|
| Plenty of examples exist of sites which have spent years or
| even decades online despite being unpopular or illegal, e.g.
| The Pirate Bay.
| joezydeco wrote:
| Peter from The Pirate Bay recently commented on the Parler
| situation.
|
| TLDR: _what a bunch of lightweight crybabies..._
|
| https://twitter.com/brokep/status/1348194329005875203
| stephankoelle wrote:
| Hetzner has usually 10 minutes for bare metal.
| nixgeek wrote:
| In all the years I've been using them they've never hit
| 10 minutes for my orders. Usually > 4 hours and < 6 hours
| though on AX and other "standard specification" boxes.
|
| On PX where you can specify NVME and other configuration,
| more like 2-3 days (particularly if the order was placed
| on a weekend).
| millzlane wrote:
| Someone should ask Peter Sunde.
| https://www.vice.com/en/article/3an7pn/pirate-bay-founder-
| th...
| bhhaskin wrote:
| If you still want to remain in the cloud? Shell game.
| Contract another company to setup and run everything on the
| cloud side and mask the traffic. Hiding the traffic can be as
| simple as front end proxies into a VPN to AWS. Or even just
| SSL traffic. AWS or what ever cloud provider would be none
| the wiser unless they are actively looking inside everyone's
| boxes. Which I highly doubt they are.
| ipsocannibal wrote:
| Pick any country without an extradition treaty with the US
| and buy rack space there.
|
| Parler was easily nuked because its tech was amateur hour not
| because US cloud providers rule the internet.
| kondro wrote:
| Good luck getting your 100Gbps+ sustained (from their
| actual requirements) of bandwidth in a non-extradition
| country to your primary audience in the USA.
| BlackPlot wrote:
| Digital Ocean, VMware,..
| xiphias2 wrote:
| Yandex Cloud, Alibaba, CloudSigma, Hetzner....maywhen it
| comes to US politics, any non-US country allows more free
| speech than US itself.
| rvz wrote:
| Self-hosting was a thing 10 - 15 years ago before the cloud
| hype and it is still an option today especially for those who
| have no choice but to do it.
| BlackPlot wrote:
| Exactly, it's crucial using multi-clouds because you never know
| when you will breach any clause of ToS. It's not so difficult
| to manage multiclouds with management tools as Anthos, Azure
| Arc, of course I would suggest independent like Openshift or
| CAST AI which pros would be one cluster
| hartator wrote:
| I don't get all the anti free speech comments here. I rather live
| in a country with real free speech but no democracy than the
| reverse. You can't have democracy without free speech.
| dlp211 wrote:
| Yes, I forgot, Europe doesn't have Democracy.
|
| Aside from this argument not being based in reality, this isn't
| even a free speech debate, it's a consequence discussion.
| Society has a right to reject your speech and not amplify it.
| NationalPark wrote:
| Sigh. I am _unbelievably_ tired of people setting this up as
| "pro free speech" vs "anti free speech". It's inflammatory (who
| proudly calls themselves "anti-free speech"? It's bad faith
| just to say that. Anyway.) and it's misleading.
|
| Most critically, almost everyone fundamentally agrees that
| censorship is a good thing, in principle. Even the most extreme
| "free speech" oriented websites remove spam, illegal
| pornography, and deliberate impersonation. Therefore, we both
| agree with the proposition that sometimes website operators
| _should_ exercise their discretion and remove content. We are
| now discussing what should be in the set of things it is
| acceptable to remove and what is not. But we are not having a
| disagreement about the concept of censorship.
|
| Another thing to think about: Is a website operator that uses
| their discretion to remove content not, by that action,
| exercising _their_ free speech? Would you have the government
| require website operators to host content they don 't want to
| host? Because that is definitely a First Amendment violation.
| MichaelRazum wrote:
| I think the discussion shouldn't be about what should be
| censorship but rather who decides it. So if you put, lets say
| illegal pornography, on your page, then there is a law that
| forbids it. Especially in a good system the person who posted
| it gets prosecuted. On the other hand if companies act like
| judge and low, it can lead to bad things I think.
| dfgdghdf wrote:
| Here's how I might open a debate with right-leaning people about
| freedom of speech.
|
| If you sell a product, but make false claims about that product,
| then you are committing fraud. You have harmed someone
| (financially) with your speech, and contract laws rightly
| overrule freedom of speech here. So, if you believe in contract
| law, which is essential for free markets, then you must believe
| in limitations on speech... the question then is simply where to
| draw the line.
| lliamander wrote:
| There are principled exceptions to freedom of speech that are
| generally easy to identify and agree upon. I think there may be
| reasonable concerns about Parler's willingness or ability to
| police illegal speech online, but the stated reason for
| deplatforming is a farce.
|
| They reference things like the capitol riot, but if I recall
| correctly the actual storming of the capitol was planned (to
| the extent that it was a planned affair) one _FaceBook_. There
| 's lots of things shared on FaceBook and Twitter that are bad
| (and even illegal) but they don't get the boot from their
| service providers - and Twitter is an Amazon customer as well!
|
| And the fact that Twitter is a big Amazon customer should not
| be ignored. It could be that Amazon's motivation was primarily
| political, but protecting the interests of one of their largest
| customers should not be ignored.
|
| But regardless, the real key here is that Amazon blatantly
| violated their contract. No company bets their business on a
| hosting service that does not provide protection against
| spontaneous cancellation of service.
|
| Even if Amazon wins the lawsuit, the message to all to all of
| their customers will be "we can turn you off at any time and
| for any reason". Expect to see a lot of migrations to other
| providers if that happens.
| [deleted]
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