> Amazon cited 98 examples of hate speech/calls for violence with included images that they had reported over weeks
This is meaningless without comparing it to how many instances of hate speech or calls for violence exist on competing sites like Twitter. What would you bet that it's not more than 98?
It's evidence that moderation is a hard problem, not that no effort to moderate is made.
Twitter and Facebook regularly ban people for violating their TOS with inappropriate content. Parler did not.
Sure, corporations will turn a blind eye to a lot for a little more profit, but this does not extend to supporting a platform full of people trying to violently overthrow the government.
Just think about this for a second: every major provider shut down seditious media shortly after what happened on 1/6. When's the last time Apple, Google, Amazon, Shopify, etc., agreed on anything in the same day?
They are not going to risk the lawsuits and possible market share loss to competitors unless they have an iron clad insurance policy. In my opinion, the only thing that offers that kind of policy is a very clear signal from law enforcement.
Who knows if it was a friendly tip or a boat load of subpoenas under seal. Whatever it was, it was scary enough to move every single cloud provider in the same direction within hours of each other. Despite this kind of coordination being more evidence for monopolistic behavior, they all came to the same conclusion: create space between us and anything related to the 1/6 sedition. Now.
> Who knows if it was a friendly tip or a boat load of subpoenas under seal.
Do you have any evidence for this at all?
There are several other alternative explanations for them doing this. There is the one the Republicans put forth, which is that they're doing it to gain favor with the party that will control the House, Senate and Presidency in a few days and be prosecuting the antitrust suits against them.
And then there's the business reason, which is that they don't want a new competitor and are taking an excuse to crush it.
Also, you can tell that everything is broken when doing something anti-competitive makes it more likely for you to win an antitrust case against you.
Did you even bother to read the Newsweek article? It says they banned anyone posting left-leaning content. There are plenty of articles saying they didn't censor violent right-wing content, but you'll have to read them to figure that out.
> There is the one the Republicans put forth, which is that they're doing it to gain favor with the party that will control the House, Senate and Presidency in a few days and be prosecuting the antitrust suits against them.
So, at the same time, and for the first time in the six election cycles they've gone through, every single cloud provider came to the same conclusion and course of action without any outside pressure in a way that provides more evidence for antitrust behavior. It's a theory, but not a good one.
> And then there's the business reason, which is that they don't want a new competitor and are taking an excuse to crush it.
There is no timeline or even universe where Parler is competition for Facebook, Google, Apple or Amazon.
> So, at the same time, and for the first time in the six election cycles they've gone through, every single cloud provider came to the same conclusion and course of action without any outside pressure in a way that provides more evidence for antitrust behavior. It's a theory, but not a good one.
Why is the businesses and politicians aligning a significant thing for you? It should be terrifying.
Also no outside pressure? A small group of employees pushed this for the entire lot. That’s outside pressure.
> Did you even bother to read the Newsweek article? It says they banned anyone posting left-leaning content.
It says this:
> Judging from the posts announcing that they've been booted, at least some of the banned Parler users seem to have signed up for the service precisely to test the limits of the app's so-called "freedom of speech" policy.
I read this to mean that people showed up to purposely troll hard enough to get banned so they could claim they got banned, and then they were. Your claim was that they don't "regularly ban people for violating their TOS with inappropriate content."
> So, at the same time, and for the first time in the six election cycles they've gone through, every single cloud provider came to the same conclusion and course of action without any outside pressure in a way that provides more evidence for antitrust behavior.
Even if there was outside pressure, you're still speculating that it was from law enforcement rather than the political branches.
How are you even sure this is the first time this has happened? Certainly it's the most high profile, but tech companies have been quietly disappearing "undesirables" for years.
> There is no timeline or even universe where Parler is competition for Facebook, Google, Apple or Amazon.
Not if they get ground into dust by competitors just as they're hitting the exponential growth stage.
I will. In the past I have advocated for them maintaining their own interests. Now I will join the group asking for them to open their phones up. By gov force if necessary because they attempted to control speech.
> This is meaningless without comparing it to how many instances of hate speech or calls of violence exist on competing sites like Twitter. What would you bet that it's not more than 98?
The better comparison would be instances of hate speech or calls to violence that were directly reported to Twitter by its hosting provider for the express purpose of requesting that they be taken down. I'd certainly give you even odds that the number of such reports that Twitter both received and ignored during that same time frame was fewer than 98, despite the fact that Twitter is orders of magnitude larger.
No doubt there are instances of similar behavior that go under the radar on Twitter and every other comparable site, but once your hosting provider has contacted you about a specific instance that's probably a sign you should do something about it.
>The lawsuit parler filed states they deleted every piece of content (and more) that AWS brought to their attention. Moderation is hard.
From an Ars Technica article[0]:
"But far from getting cut off suddenly, Parler had months of warning, Amazon says. Amazon's filing included copies of emails it sent to Parler in mid-November (PDF, content warning for racial slurs) containing screenshots full of racist invective about Democrats, including former First Lady Michelle Obama, with a series of responses from other users to "kill 'em all."
And
"Representatives from AWS spoke with Parler executive leadership on both January 8 and 9 about the platform's "content moderation policies, processes, and tools," Amazon said. In response, Parler allegedly offered steps that would rely on "volunteer" moderation, and Parler CEO John Matze allegedly told AWS that "Parler had a backlog of 26,000 reports of content that violated its community standards and remained on its service."
I mean there's no way parler (up until recent growth explosion) was pulling in more than 1MM - with 30 employees I doubt they could afford to pay moderators. It's not fair to judge a small company by the same standards as established companies w.r.t. hard problems like moderation, but here many people are comparing them more harshly than they compare established businesses like twitter and facebook which routinely are used to incite riots and violence.
Twitter and Facebook both use AWS for hosting parts of their website. Both of them are top 10 clients of AWS, with Facebook being on the AWS's biggest clients.
> This is meaningless without comparing it to how many instances of hate speech or calls for violence exist on competing sites like Twitter.
I think at most this would allow you to accuse AWS of hypocrisy, but the point is moot since Twitter, while an AWS customer, does not host content on AWS as far as I'm aware.
Really though, it has no bearing. You can argue that AWS is inconsistent in its enforcement but it does not change whether they have the right to that enforcement.
> This is meaningless without comparing it to how many instances of hate speech or calls for violence exist on competing sites like Twitter.
This statement omits the fact that Parler's userbase originated from Twitter's crackdown on hate speech and calls for violence that got a fair share of them banned from the platform.
It is not meaningless at all. Twitter has no bearing on agreements between AWS and Parler. Just because Parler considers them a competitor doesn't mean they have anything to do with a two-party contract when they aren't a party to it.
That's not really the point. It's a question of whether the expectation is reasonable. If Twitter and Facebook can't do it then it's strong evidence that it's not.
> That's not really the point. It's a question of whether the expectation is reasonable
That’s a made up point, though. The AWS contract makes no mention of “reasonable effort” or anything like that.
Yes, it is worthwhile to compare moderation on Parler to that of FB etc, but it has no bearing on whether Amazon had the right to terminate Parler’s contract, which they absolutely did. Within the context of that discussion the comparison to FB and Twitter is just whataboutism. They aren’t Parler and they aren’t hosted by AWS.
This is meaningless without comparing it to how many instances of hate speech or calls for violence exist on competing sites like Twitter. What would you bet that it's not more than 98?
It's evidence that moderation is a hard problem, not that no effort to moderate is made.