skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I made https://dvd.js.org?names=sushi,tacos,pizza as a silly thing for stuff like this last year too
This is a nitpick irrelevant to your point, but still: "the world's oldest democracy" is a meaningless title because who it belongs to depends on the definition of "democracy". I'm sure there's at least half a dozen different places where it is customary to claim the title. See here for data points: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_democracy

I'd say the right way to define "democracy" is not as a system of governance; but rather as a worldview, as an ideology and as an effort.
These groups are only able to organize and recruit at this scale because of these platforms.
A tale as old as HN itself: a service enforces its own Terms of Service, and commenters fall over themselves to defend an absurd absolutist ideal of "free speech" even when it directly leads to a violent mob committing sedition against the United States.

Spare us, please. Reconcile your ideals with what's in front of you today before insisting that we need to live up to those ideals.
Section 230 protects all entities with user-generated content, that includes Facebook and Twitter as well as Uncle Frank's Model Train Forum. The repeal of 230 would essentially cement those centralized sites as the sole platforms however, as Uncle Frank doesn't have paid moderation teams or a legal department, and only makes $7.44 ad revenue each month. Frank won't be able to afford the legal costs if someone starts spamming it with libelous content and he's busy and doesn't get around to taking the posts down for a couple days.
A slim majority is not "everyone else". Your rhetoric marginalizes 40-50% of the country. Why feed into the division and conflict like this? Why have this knee-jerk reaction of hateful dismissal? Don't we need some degree of mutual respect and cooperation?
Because intelligence is a more general purpose tool that can be used to overcome more specialized advantages.
If demandinf murder is your political platform, and disallowing murder is leftist, then I guess AWS will shut you down for leftist political reasons, yeah.
Remarkably tepid response.
When you demand "trial by combat", and then the angry mob clubs a police officer to death, that's inciting violence.
Yep. There's a left wing inside the Democratic party, but the Democratic party is not left wing.

George Soros is not "left wing"
Bill Clinton was not "left", and Hilary wasn't either.

It's not even a question of what's relative. They don't even call themselves "left."

I spent much of my 20s and 30s in the organized and unorganized left, as an activist. Back then (90s, mostly), globalization was the enemy, not the goal. We were tear gassed at the Summit of the Americas in Quebec City protesting the negotiation of trade agreements. It's a strange world to see now people lump BLM and Bernie Sanders and your local Trotskyite sect in the same camp as Biden, and "globalists" and "George Soros."

As in 1930s Germany, the far right has adopted certain clasically left positions on certain issues in order to mobilize the working class, but for opposite goals. Many of the slogans chanted in the Capitol building the other day ("whose house? our house?") are directly lifted from left wing activists.

Nothing speaks to the disintegration and loss of the actual socialist left in North America more than the fact people can't identify them anymore from the background neoliberalism of the American political mainstream.
Your assertions are wrong.

No one has looked at the present election based off claims 8 months ago, people witnessed openly irregular behavior during the actual election and after.

The current fervor around silencing, labeling, and berating rather than reassuring fears and assisting in auditing to legitimize the election is a significant problem and not a healthy look.
The rhetoric throughout society is getting hotter, thens no way some of that isn't going to spill here. Especially when big tech are right dash in the middle of these political slap fights.
I also get the "you're posting too fast" messages...

Sarcasm follows: But oooh yeah, it's a giant conspiracy, everyone's out to suppress your views!
CampaignMonitor, the service the Trump organisation used for its mail services, has suspended Trump's access.

https://twitter.com/DaveLeeFT/status/1347724204473372672

Press releases rely on press organisations to distribute, which aren't under Trump's control, unlike his previous social media accounts, which had a reach of millions by themselves.

I am not trying to impute any kind of values onto these facts. They're just things that have happened around the deplatforming of Trump, post 6th January.
My grandmother survived the Bolshevik revolution, a real, actually violent left. That you would even dare compare the "radical left" of the US with actual violent revolutionaries makes me question how much of the matter you actually know.
I started out as a software engineer, but have spent the 8 years building and running a custom software development agency, which was acquired last year by a larger company.

I am now looking to help developers who want to start a software agency themselves, so have created Dev to Agency where I am writing about the lessons and insights I learned.

https://www.devtoagency.com
Apple requires moderation tools for public user generated content for all apps. If Parler is refusing to do anything, this falls well within Apple's standard rules.
Legally, incitement is actually pretty constrained to immanent lawless action--i.e. someone doing something bad right now, not at some undefined point in the future, in clear terms.

The Volokh Conspiracy discussed this just the other day:

https://reason.com/volokh/2021/01/08/can-president-trump-be-...
the angry mob will then go after the networks doing the peering. it's chilling to me the speed at which the censorship is happening and the speed at which the 'outrage' shifts.
Jesus that whole site is like a bunch of racist insane Yosemite Sam impersonators. I wouldn’t want them as a customer either.
What happens when Equinix decides to stop providing interconnect to that company for similar reasons?
Soft Drink: A soft drink is a drink that usually contains carbonated water, a sweetener, and a natural or artificial flavoring.

Water is water. Juice is juice. Soft drinks are fucking diabetes in a can.
This is what Trump said during his January 6th speech:

"So we’re going to, we’re going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue, I love Pennsylvania Avenue, and we’re going to the Capitol and we’re going to try and give… The Democrats are hopeless. They’re never voting for anything, not even one vote. But we’re going to try and give our Republicans, the weak ones, because the strong ones don’t need any of our help, we’re going to try and give them the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country. So let’s walk down Pennsylvania Avenue."
I can't stop thinking about this… lol

"… What about Twitter? I have no idea what Twitter is good for. But if it flips out every tyrant in the Middle East, I'm interested." - Michael Rogers, Founder, Practical Futurist; Futurist-in-Residence, New York Times Company[0]

http://web.archive.org/web/20140531073143/http://www.cfr.org...
No, they've explicitly demonstrated that they're unwilling to moderate people making threats of violence, to a degree that Amazon is unwilling to continue to provide them with the tools to let their users make those threats.

The right to threaten people with death is, weirdly enough, not actually a right.
Did you read the article and some of the screenshots?

Are you ok with hosting violent content?
Social media companies have quasi-monopolies and using alternatives is both difficult and impractical.

So did the press, and yet they were expressly granted this freedom. Buying a printing press and starting your own paper wasn't easy either, but the 1st amendment never said it was supposed to be.
Because, The political Ideology of the United States already does not do that?

Why do you think we have a Military? Why do you think we have a criminal system? Why do you think we have Justice and Courts?

The whole creation of the United States was unethical because every citizen was of the British Crown and were traitors.

Or, are you not aware of your history and that this de platforming is only making the other side message much more stronger.

It really is eye-widening how many people fail to see the consequence of removing a service, and how it hinders intelligence, counter intelligence and general observation.
One of the most disturbing things about this event is the particular set of words being used to describe it: terrorist attack, assault on the capitol, violent uprising.

To me, and I'm sure to most people, words like "terrorist attack" conjure images of mass murder via gunfire or vehicles, kidnappings, and brutal executions. But none of those things happened here. If one does consider this to be a "violent terrorist attack", then what words are left to describe an actual terrorist attack?

Is anyone else disturbed that the discourse is being ushered toward these particular words; that you're being made to associate a riot of angry citizens with mass-murder attacks by men wearing balaclavas and wielding AK's? To use these words, "terrorist attack, assault on the capitol, violent uprising", for this event, it's imprecise, misleading.

Orwell has a wonderful essay covering this imprecise and practically manipulative use of language. It's a brilliant read, and very relevant at the moment: https://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_poli...
They have to do this by the fact that Google and Apple preceded them, they don't want to appear as the bad guys.
They didn’t miss it, they don’t care. AWS doesn’t care about incitement to violence either, which I have never seen on Parler FWIW despite being a heavy user. It’s political grandstanding, and a lame appeal to their woke engineers to keep the dollars flowing in.
Corporate power bereft of ultra-nationalism, and generic authoritarianism, are not fascism. Whatever else you can say about the Democrats, they are not in favor of blood-and-soil policies. I did not downvote your post but I find your watering down of the phrase of fascism to be worth taking issue with. As for the troubling power of mega-corporations, it’s rather sad that this is the incident that made you aware of it. So you didn’t see fit to criticize them until now?
One guy rolled up with a truck off molotov cocktails and firearms. Several IEDs were discovered and detonated by bomb squads.
If you are in any way competing with Amazon, you should think twice before hosting on AWS.
> So AWS is now the arbiter of what actions are supposedly harmful to the fabric of democratic society? It's one thing for the courts to do this, it's quite another for infrastructure providers to decide it's now their job to police their customers.

Infrastructure providers have already decided they get to police their customers, eg. cloudflare dropping stormfront or other white supremacists as customers.

EDIT: To be clear I agree it is entirely worrying that infrastructure that takes up a significant amount of the known internet is under the control of a large corporation that can seemingly decide to boot people for violations of terms of service. I just want to disagree that this is new. It's not new. It's old and well-established by now. If we want to change this, it'll have to be through a law.
Those communities are dwindling in number. Increasingly, you step out of line once with the Left-leaning mindset, you are muted or banned. And these moderators will tell you to go elsewhere.

Except Google, Apple, AWS, etc. are now actively ridding the Internet of that 'elsewhere'.

Funny how just a few short years ago Google & Co. justified running Stormfront off the internet because of their extreme views. Funny how in just a few steps the justification went from 'extreme views' to 'Alex and Milo' to 'they say things we don't like'. Good luck staying amused with what comes over the next couple years.
Citation needed. Where?
It's telling that didn't take it down. If things go really badly for that family I won't be surprised. Even the remaining Koch brother washed his hands of these people. So now it's their baby.
So you think racism is not a threat to our nation? We'll send you to the re-education camp!
Domain registars seems a bit more of a sticky wicket. That is quite a bit more complex than simply hosting your own website, and I have no way around it and I'm unsure as to what the solution should be, TBH. I'd say it should be under governmental control, but they move at a snail's pace and I doubt they could handle the volume.

As for monitoring and throttling personal web traffic from our homes, that's long been an issue which is already an issue and not just with Verizon. EFF has brought suit in the courts, but to no avail, as of yet. So as for being far fetched, not only is it not, it's happening now. Comcast regularly throttles traffic to gaming sites/services during peak television hours. What's the difference?
Is it Ok to force owners of a private company to host content they find objectionable? Gay porn on the Hobby Lobby forums?

AWS is a private business, they don't have to host anything they don't want to. Forcing them to host parler would be an egregious violation of their right to choose who they associate with.

I think a way more interest question is this - what about modern US conservatism makes violence so attractive to it? You cannot have a conservative forum that will not rapidly devolve into violent threats. Even /r/conservative, the more mainstream and mature conservative subreddit is absolutely full of people threatening revolution, backs against the wall, etc.

The reality is that we as a society are getting numb to this and are actually being far too tolerant.
Russia does not care much about Spratly Islands and it will gladly trade recognition of China's sovereignty over them for recognition of Crimea/South Osetia/Abkhazia or even for smaller geopolitical favors. As for Taiwan, Russia's official stance has always been that it's part of the mainland China, so I doubt it will do anything beside raising pointless "concerns" in the event of its military occupation. If anything, from realpolitik point of view it will be beneficial for Russia, since a military conflict over Taiwan would significantly undermine either US', or China's geopolitical positions, or even both of them.
Why would you assume that Amazon is only ever going to stick to that? It's a self-imposed set of rules. What's stopping them from just changing the rules if they want to e.g. block sites critical of how they treat their workers?
The platform is being actively used to plan attacks on our government... at a certain point this becomes a liability to any party that enabled it. As it should.
AWS is now and always has been the arbiter of what they allow on their platform. Parler agrees to the terms of service, just like any other AWS customer. Also, providers have to police their customers - they don't want 'wrongful death' lawsuits, for instance.

As for you other concerns, the conventional wisdom around HN is "Don't build your business on third party infrastructure/services". If they close your account because 'a bad person says nice things' about you, or just because they don't like your face, that's a known risk. There a numerous examples of cloud providers (especially google) shutting down accounts. Its nothing new, and should be accounted for in your business plan.
Unfortunately, a more robustly social-justice-informed code of conduct is a requirement to be supported by (and receive funding from) some big players in the online privacy/security community.

On a completely unrelated note not at all related to the above paragraph, ask me if you need any help with the Whonix sections.
Parler sprang up as a reaction to widespread deplatforming of both mainstream conservatives and violent radicals. What this achieves in practice is giving violent extremists a platform where they're free to radicalize ("redpill") moderate conservatives who've even been primed (via deplatforming) to distrust mainstream media and seek alternate sources of information. It's the opposite of what you want if you care about re-unifying the political landscape around rejection of violent extremism.
Those things are for judges to decide, not an Internet mob (or militant employees of Big Tech).
Hiding dangerous content amongst innocent content is even more egregious. It's much easier to identify and deal with when it's out in the open.

Twitter also has a much larger audience to push hate and violence to.
If they were truly free speech absolutists they would acknowledge the Twitter/AWS/Apple/Google/etc. have the free speech right to decide what content they want to host.
i think it's reasonable that if you are planning violence, you should not be allowed to do it on a public platform, amplified to millions of people. do it in secret, like the good old days!
What does that even mean? Obama literally had his own drone kill list; he personally authorized the drone-execution of multiple American citizens abroad without trial. Yet much more than keeping Twitter access, he got a Nobel peace prize.

"Unethical" is a post-hoc rationalization; what we're seeing now goes much deeper than that.
Ask HN: How fragile Signal is as a single point of failure?
- It's a centralized service

- Essentially led by one person - Moxie

What if Signal (its servers, etc) is blocked/shutdown by force?

What if Moxie is detained/etc?

What are the contingency plans, if any?

(Federation is apparently not an option because Moxie has previously ruled out the idea in no uncertain terms)
I expect them to negotiate on rates like an adult. Mozilla is taking an activist role, and (to me at least) have been flaunting their incompetence for at least a decade on this topic.
"No justice no peace"
In most democratic countries it's quite common to see actual fascists in elections getting 5-15% of the vote. It is very much a fact that that's erring on the smaller side of the proportion of people in democratic societies who hold authoritarian positions.
In my view, nobody's saying that all amplifiers sound alike. Indeed, you can design an amplifier to have a pronounced sonic signature, which is common in the guitar amplifier world.

A more precise statement might be that two amplifiers with the same transfer function should sound alike, but this needs additional clarification, namely a specified margin of error. Finding out that margin of error has been a pursuit of acoustics research, and is the original motivation for the ABX test. For instance, I read that when Sony developed their MiniDisc recorder, the data compression scheme was subjected to extensive ABX testing.
Why wouldn't the reasons for Parler being removed from application marketplaces be extricated from the more mainstream elements of the political ideology?

Why not say "hey, get out of our party! you're not welcome here. we are against the extremist views you hold, and you're making it harder for us as a party to gather and share our ideas"?
I think it's the organised violence in particular this time.

But to your broader point, either AWS is a privately operated company or it's public infrastructure, I don't believe it can be both. There is absolutely nothing stopping the owners of Parler from running their own servers either.

I think you are right that they will move to more fringe parts of the web, but I think that is just how regular society works. A society holds some values, and if you don't hold those same values within a certain margin or actively work against them in this case (non-violence), that society pushes you to the fringes.
BLM protesters were murdering for months?

If "BLM people" were calling for murders in public in the same way these Capitol people have been, then absolutely they should be kicked off platforms. I don't think many would disagree with that.
In no way does this describe conservative discourse. This just demonstrates how far apart the bubbles are growing.
Did you read the Parler screen captures in the article? They are blatently and directly calling for death and murder. Prohibiting the inciting of violence is not a political decision.
https://joinpeertube.org/instances#instances-list
Had a same issue with their Studio line a few years back. It was a ship of Thesus situation. Each and every part was more or less replaced.

I have a Thinkpad T450s and there's been no issue in the past 5 years of owning it.
Taiwan doesn’t want to secede, rather their claim is that China is unlawfully occupied.
The whole Parler thing is very interesting to me. Many people point out that Twitter, Facebook, and other social networks have the same TOS violating content that Parler does but I wonder if this will come down to a "reasonable attempt" situation like Youtube copyright.

Youtube and later on Twitch got into trouble with the RIAA and other major media groups because Youtube allows users to upload copyrighted material. I believe the result of the lawsuit vs Viacom was that Google has to make a reasonable attempt to keep copyright material off Youtube which brought about the ContentID system.

Circling this back to Parler, Twitter and Facebook both have the same type of "hate speech" that Parler does that would violate Google's, Apple's, and AWS ToS but the difference is they can make the claim they make a "reasonable attempt" to keep those comments off while Parler does not.

There's also the argument that now that the Democrats are in charge, the heads at FAANG is increasingly worried about regulation and getting broken up so it's in their best interest to take a harder stance on this. I think the coming months will be very interesting.
It seems to be the current legal situation that internet service providers can choose who they do business with.

That doesn't mean that is the only possible regulatory regime, or that it is an inevitable path to some particular outcome.

Is there some carrot we could feed AWS to get them to give up the choice of who to do business with?
Please write and share a blog post to guide others looking for a more terrorism-friendly web host.
Who has lost the ability to speak freely online? The only people who have been banned from speaking are a few high profile people who broke the T&Cs, and were recognized for their toxicity.

This is deplatforming -a platform-, not those people. Every individual on Parler can go create accounts and post on Twitter and Facebook and etc...unless, of course, their toxicity causes them to be banned there.

Nothing legally, or fairly, forces one platform to host another platform.
I don’t know if I would consider living a long human life a hot streak.