skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are legitimate business concerns:

1. What if it turns out that Facebook Groups were utilized in the effort by some in the mob to capture members of Congress in the Capitol and hang the Vice President, and that some of this was explicit ahead of time? This isn't theoretical -- keep in mind that the group planning to kidnap Gov. Whitmer organized on Facebook. Did Facebook play a role in promoting people to join that group? This creates not just PR problems, but also hiring problems. Who wants to write the algorithm that recommended a hate group and play a role in radicalizing people to violence?

2. A key moment from the Congressional hearings into tech companies was when Jack Dorsey, asked if the cure for bad speech is more speech, replied: "All of our policies are focused on encouraging more speech. What we saw and what the market told us was that people would not put up with abuse, harassment, and misleading information that would cause offline harm, and they would leave our service because of it." It's hard to fault these companies for wanting growth, and kicking people out can actually encourage that growth!

3. Young people are often the most profitable audiences. And many of the key creators for those audiences are also young. It's a serious problem for YouTube if their brand becomes Rudy Giuliani instead of [whatever makeup vlogger is popular right now]. This is similar to point (2), but slightly different. Even a smaller audience can be more profitable.

To the "no alternative" point, I'm sympathetic to anti-monopoly efforts. Mostly for my own left-wing reasons: https://democracyjournal.org/arguments/imagining-a-democrati...

But also, these efforts should be broader than just the technology companies: http://concentrationcrisis.openmarketsinstitute.org

That said, even if you took these actions, it'd be hard for any company that wasn't taking moderation seriously among people planning violent overthrows of government. (Which I think is a good thing. Companies should care if armed insurrections are openly being plotted on the merits, not just for business reasons.)
Ben Thompson over at Stratechery had a pretty good post on approaching content moderation here https://stratechery.com/2021/trump-and-twitter/

Will be interesting to see what he says next week about AWS, as that's further down the stack than something like Twitter.
Well, personally, I'll never do business with AWS again, and I'll advocate against using them every place I work from now on (I already argue against using proprietary AWS services in order to keep things portable). Does that matter much to them? No, but I can only control what I do.
If by "wrongthink" you mean actively calling for and planning attacks on elected officials, I have no doubt that will continue to get you banned from all sorts of private enterprises.

I'm confident if I show up to work on Monday and start asking people on our slack channel who wants to help me plan an assassination on an elected official I'll also be "de-platformed" for my "wrong think" by my company.

This is a simple problem to to solve: stop planning and committing acts of violence because you disagree with someone else's politics. Nobody is getting banned because they think abortion is wrong or that we should try to balance the national deficit...
On that demo page if I switch between the original, jpeg, webp, and avif tabs, the colors shift visibly. I have an AdobeRGB wide-color-gamut monitor configured in 10-bit mode, use Firefox with color-management enabled, and I have the AdobeRGB profile correctly set in Windows.

It is incredible to me that in 2021 the web makes it impossible to get even vaguely correct colours onto a screen.

I don't know who's to blame here: Web standards bodies, Mozilla, or the specific AVIF decoder.

But I do know that color-blind people are creating the next generation of imaging standards.
Most enjoyable read.
> Have Parler done anything specific to attract extremists

The site was, for sure, intended originally as a right wing twitter. While they probably don't want extremists, per se, they have made absolutely no attempt to moderate legitimately violent rhetoric (c.f. the Lin Wood threat last week to have Pence executed, which seems extremely frightening in retrospect).

You can see some collected horror shows via aggregation like https://twitter.com/RWParlerWatch and https://www.reddit.com/r/ParlerWatch/

It is Daily Stormer or 8kun? No, not yet. But it's really, really bad there.
So, your argument is "AWS told a service that it needed to stop hosting death threats, the service didn't comply with that request, and AWS terminated the service... therefore they're going to shut down everyone they don't like"

You pole vaulted right over the slippery slope there.
Reddit made their bones with what I'd consider very high quality content. I used reddit before the Digg exodus and it was very techy and high-brow for the most part. Then came the cat pics and corny jokes. Then it spiralled.
Giving people a safe space to network and plan attacks on US soil (or anywhere) is not "wrongthink", it is wrong.
So like CHAZ?
“Slippery slope” is a logical fallacy.

For reasons I can’t quite figure out, HN will crucify you for equating correlation with causation, but seems incredibly fond of this equally invalid mode of reasoning.
So the EFF is fine with a political party censoring their rivals as long as the work is outsourced to their corporate operatives.
18 U.S. Code § 2383 - Rebellion or insurrection

Whoever incites, sets on foot, assists, or engages in any rebellion or insurrection against the authority of the United States or the laws thereof, or gives aid or comfort thereto, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.
How long until their registrar or nameserver provider bounces them, too?.. how upstream will this go?
So lay out your theory of things should work and be prepared to defend it. It's easy to just ask questions and never make any positive proposals.
Convince your friends to change platform. If they won't, and it is such a foundational issue to you then perhaps you should either not worry about your social interactions being censored or find different friends. If my friends frequent a bowling alley I find questionable am I "forced" to partake because that is where my friends frequent? Your argument carries little weight to coerce such lax regulation.

Tangentially, not terminating business with Parler could be construed as not operating in their shareholders best interest, a breach of their fiduciary duty, as it could potentially harm future business opportunities if they become associated with the platform. In this case AWS is not a utility that holds a monopoly on some resource. There is market competition, and hosting your own service is an option. If a telcom prevented the latter I'd agree with your argument, as there aren't necessarily alternate options. Even then the law outlines a framework where some content is illegal that any lawyer working for the firm could green flag for client/contract termination.
IMO The ballpoint anecdote has been severely misinterpreted by western media. The narrative seems to be lol China only learned to make ball point pen recently, when really it was Premier LiKeQiang politicized importance of precision manufacturing for national security, and 2 years later Chinese industry developed tungsten carbide manufacturing capabilities for advanced munitions. There was no economically sensible reason for domestic ballpoint manufacturing, the entire market dominated by Japan and Swiss was only worth 20M. Zero rationale for Chinese industry to coordinate tons of resources for this project outside of national security. The TLDR should be China is scarily efficient at pursuing national security goals.

Chinese military modernization is explicitly designed to counter US in Taiwan invasion scenario. They have no other security commitments, the goal is singular and funded by a budget that is equivalent to 87% of Pentagons by PPP. China doesn't have hundreds of bases, expensive pensions, legacy system to maintain. Last year alone they seem to have figured out most of the pressing turbojet issues as well as completed enough space infrastructure for full maritime surveillance persistence in SCS. These were the largest deficiencies western analysts had to doubt Chinese capabilities. Basically, any piece on Chinese military capabilities from 2+ years ago is out of date. That's how fast things are moving.

>social engineering and psyops

As far as I'm aware, there is no credible research to demonstrate Chinese conducts large influence operations in English abroad. It's mostly limited to mandarin targeting Chinese diaspora. That said, things will certainly be interesting if China actually decided to invest heavily in this capability. English fluency is still somewhat valuable resource in China, it's not being wasted to troll western net. But pool of English literacy is growing massively in recent years and there will be a surplus ready for weaponization.
I'm sure they are going through the same calculus. Leftists at all tech companies have been stacking their management with left authoritarian sympathizers for years, most from overseas. However, LPOD is probably heavily right leaning, so who knows what faction they will be on. (LPOD = larry ellison, prince of darkness)
At what point should something like AWS be a "common carrier" though?
I have a theory that difference isn’t just quality level of the engineers, but the shared interest and stakes. Most things we attribute to engineering incompetence are really just carelessness because the stakes don’t appear high.
And money. You forgot that part.
Giant corporations bring all sorts of problems.

However, I think the real question is, if you have qualms about them, why use them at all? There are alternatives. Generally, people use them because they want to reach the corps. audience, or want to use the corps. infrastructure because its 'easier' then building there own. If thats the case, you're basically saying you're 'okay' with them having all the rights the TOS grants them.
Amazon didn't write this law.

18 U.S. Code § 2383 - Rebellion or insurrection

Whoever incites, sets on foot, assists, or engages in any rebellion or insurrection against the authority of the United States or the laws thereof, or gives aid or comfort thereto, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.
I too thought the same, but because I like empirics, I went out and tested it.

Repression works.

You make a few assumptions here, which are important to examine.

First, it was centralized power of the church, which was fighting facts that were not in congruences with their beliefs. However, today the positions are reversed, it is faith in unreal outcomes that is asking for credibility at the same level as facts.

The people who stormed America's highest houses were there because they believed that an election wasn't fair. Nothing will convince them otherwise, no matter what the evidence.

This is the essence of faith, and exactly why free speech exists. To allow human beings to be governed by reason over unreason or emotion.

Secondly - we know for a fact, that emotion is the fastest way to co-opt logic. You can take a look at politics at home or around the world for evidence - wedge issues win, logic doesn't.

If you aren't going to exert a force to counter emotional manipulation, then your people will be emotionally manipulated. They will be manipulated the hardest, by those who find that certain facts don't work for them.

Finally - Journalism is failing because of other reasons than trust. It was an unviable market a while back. Their last source of income was the classifieds, and craigslist alone put an end to that.

Journalism which is beholden to advertising will always have to compete with entertainment. Meaning that if its not more entertaining than a sports channel, advertising money will simply go elsewhere.

I can only see independent, government or public founded journalism as the solution.
This standard came in place after prior precedent jailed someone for peacefully protesting the draft. Be very careful what speech you let the government criminalize, it usually goes places you didn't expect.

For the record, the case of the draft protestor being jailed is where the phrase "shout fire in a crowded theater" comes from. Food for thought.
There are incitements to violence presented in the buzzfeed news article that is the root of this thread.

> We need to start systematically assassinating #liberal leaders, liberal activists, #blm leaders
It’s all about legal liability.

When people die lawsuits fly.
That's kind of an issue then - YouTube is only partly (probably a single-digit-percent given they dropped the direct share feature[0]) about sharing videos with friends - most people stick around for the recommendations, ie. the endless stream of interesting/intriguing/funny content. Most of that content currently dominating YT (at least, at the quantity that it's produced) is only possible due to these creators making YouTube their full-time job and getting paid to do it. Linus Tech Tips (which also runs Techquickie and Techlinked) attributes 26% of their total revenue to YT Ads[1], and the other categories (like merchandise/affiliate links) aren't something everyone can do if their videos aren't about products available on Amazon or can't grow their merch at the rate LTT does. If PT is just about sharing videos, then you might as well run a nextcloud instance instead since 'no ads' is a huge downside to PT for creators.

0: https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/21/youtube-is-closing-its-pri...

1: https://youtu.be/-zt57TWkTF4?t=395
Every platform waxes poetic about "free speech" to users. Then they have to deal with the reality some users are more trouble than they're worth and they click ban. Or advertisers who pay the bills want "brand safety."
I didn't have "Taiwan" on my list of outgoing presidential pardons.

Glad to see us moving towards normalization, but weird to wait until the last week of the administration to play that card.
This reminded me about Kovrigin's chronicles, a story by Vadim Shefner that I read as a kid. It's somewhat musing on the soviet research atmosphere and all, but the background there was that a man invented a way to turn water into a special sort of ice which could be used as a universal unbreakable material, with a bold idea of building cities under the ocean because there is so much space on our planet.
This is the power of network effects. Being kicked of one service is survivable. Getting kicked off all the major ones is a real existential threat to any company. Network effects aren't just users talking to other users, but platforms with overlapping terms of service clauses and what they allow and don't allow. Find yourself in the Venn diagram of what most of them won't allow and your system becomes functionally unworkable in today's society.

The flip side of this is that if, years from now there's a "free speech" payment processor, cloud host, social network and all the rest, de-platforming for a different subculture than the current mainstream service providers allow becomes harder. We talk about the balkanization of the internet, but there's a possible future where there is a balkanization across cultural lines based on overlapping ethos, not just geographical divisions.
It’s already happened. Since reddit banned r/theDonald, followers migrated over to their own site, thedonald.win. They are now much bigger in traffic, and called for storming of the capital building on Jan 6th.

Because only Trump supporters really visit that site, no one called it out despite the Jan 6th events being organised by millions right in the open.

If reddit didn’t ban TD, this wouldn’t have happened. It wouldn’t have become this radicalised.
The fastest way to get booted or "moderated" on Parler is to post material critical of Trump or the GOP, there's numerous people posting screenshot/evidence of their bans on Twitter, so it's quite clear Parler actually isn't truly about free speech, and does have the capability to moderate content.

https://happymag.tv/parler-free-speech-social-media-banning-...

This means that all of the high minded talk of freedom of speech by the founder is really just a charade, and Parler is really just a right-wing social network.
> Yeah, I’d wager the vast majority of Parler users are either involved in the kinds of shit

You lost your wager. Majority of Parler users are not. If you dig enough, you can find shit - just as easy as on Twitter or Facebook, which hosts hundreds of violent groups and thousands of stupid comments which can be interpreted as advocating violence, though in 99.9% of cases it's just people being stupid on the internet - but majority of the users aren't that. It's just regular people who happen to be to the right of Jack Dorsey politically.
Literally attacking our election process is illegal. Were you not aware?
To resolve this whataboutism, I'd be perfectly fine with banning Twitter until they improved their moderation practices. But it's whataboutism nevertheless, no?
In the before times, I was doing olympic weightlifting as well, and I had very similar problems. I've always had weirdly loose shoulder joints (and can partially dislocate them), as well as weird things with the tendons in my knuckles. And when I started lifting, I would always have trouble with the jerk. Any time I did heavy jerks frequently, I would get escalating shoulder pain. As I trained more, I got better at maintaining shoulder stability. Power jerks still give me a lot of trouble, but split jerks are fine. Though with the pandemic, I haven't trained in months, and my shoulders are feeling all wonky again.

On a similar note, squatting was the absolute best thing for my knees. I had knee pain since I was about ten, and it didn't let up until I started squatting heavy. And whenever I would stop for a couple weeks, the pain would come back.
Not OP, but it seems more reasonable to think they are choosing not to do business because they don't want to risk AWS deciding to shut them off and give them one day's notice to move their entire infrastructure.
Basically the EFF are more concerned they don‘t ban political accounts for stuff normal people get banned for. Seems fair.
It has been, and its enforcement is then passed on to some activists working for Big Tech or outsourced moderators working for $1 an hour. If people don't like how a specific person enforces this or interpreted a judge's rule, they must pony up the money to challenge in court.
TOS doesn’t mean anything if they aren’t enforced.
The only web advertising I ever see is from Daring Fireball precisely because it doesn't come from an ad network.
> So AWS is now the arbiter of what actions are supposedly harmful to the fabric of democratic society?

No, there are other hosts. But... is it really so wrong to be glad that someone is trying to arbitrate this? Parler was a persistent host to exactly the kind of violent rhetoric that turned into Wednesday's coup. At some point we have to make a call and shut stuff like that down, right?

I mean, yes, it sucks that the overlap between "conventional republican politics" and "rhetoric inspiring real life violence" is so high. So surely there is some friendly fire here on speech we'd like to keep. But... I don't see why Amazon should be responsible for letting this fester like it has either.
I can't speak for everyone, but I haven't forgotten about those things and was arguing at the time that much of that rhetoric needed to be shut down. I do wish that internet platforms would consistently shut down everyone who plans violence, but I'm hardly gonna say that this violence should be allowed just because other kinds were allowed in the past.
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Statement by John Matze

"Sunday (tomorrow) at midnight Amazon will be shutting off all of our servers in an attempt to completely remove free speech off the internet. There is the possibility Parler will be unavailable on the internet for up to a week as we rebuild from scratch. We prepared for events like this by never relying on amazons proprietary infrastructure and building bare metal products.

We will try our best to move to a new provider right now as we have many competing for our business, however Amazon, Google and Apple purposefully did this as a coordinated effort knowing our options would be limited and knowing this would inflict the most damage right as President Trump was banned from the tech companies.

This was a coordinated attack by the tech giants to kill competition in the market place. We were too successful too fast. You can expect the war on competition and free speech to continue, but don’t count us out."

https://www.parler.com/profile/John/posts
It's hard to know where to draw the line but I think we can very comfortably say that it's somewhere south of Nazi terrorists. Speech issues are tricky but even the Supreme Court doesn't think incitement is protected by the first amendment.
>But the essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In reality, it is the ensemble of the social relations.

We should really fear the very near future in which it's so easy to assasinate a man by simply pushing a button and cut off all of his social relations.
What happened to a cornerstone of American free world values

"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"

Free speech is in grave danger
AWS is not infrastructure. It is a service for which there is competition, as well as the option of rolling your own. Telcoms are infrastructure because generally there is not competition and you can't just run your own fiber.
There are over a thousand links and not all of it is strong evidence but they surely suggest that there were irregularities in more than one location.

There are sworn affidavits under penalty of prejury [1], video showing dead people voting [2], votes in the trash [3], video evience [4] just to give you some examples.

[1]: https://justthenews.com/sites/default/files/2020-11/Miller_D...
[2]: https://twitter.com/fleccas/status/1324237476186202113
[3]: https://lbry.tv/@CapitalistChile:0/shredded-ballots-have-bee...
[4]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ0xDWhWUxk
Chomsky is talking about free speech in the context of academic debate.

Death threats and similar do not fit in any shape or form into "free speech".
> Fascism (/ˈfæʃɪzəm/) is a form of far-right, authoritarian ultranationalism characterized by dictatorial power, forcible suppression of opposition and strong regimentation of society and of the economy which came to prominence in early 20th-century Europe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism#Definitions
Twitter isn't censoring the vast majority of people. One group will be the vast majority of people who don't get kicked off Twitter. The other group will be a relatively tiny collection of extremists.
75 million people voted for Trump, but 75 million people do not support what happened on Wednesday. A good number of the people that voted for Trump voted for him because they didn’t believe the warnings from the other side about just how unhinged Trump is. And then they got to witness this first hand this week.

There’s still undoubtedly a large group of supporters who believe every word that Trump says, and who he can whip into a frenzy. And that group can absolutely do a lot of damage. But it’s nowhere near 75 million people would would be ok burning democracy down because Trump told them to.