skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Amazon on Saturday kicked Parler off its Web hosting services. Parler, a social network favored by conservative politicians and extremists, was used to help plan and coordinate the January 6 attempted coup on Washington D.C. It has recently been overrun with messages encouraging “Patriots” to march on Washington D.C. with weapons on January 19.

Was this an "attempted coup" as well:

> https://www.cnn.com/us/live-news/george-floyd-protests-05-31...

> More than 60 US Secret Service Uniformed Division officers and special agents were injured starting Friday night through Sunday morning near the White House as protests rocked Washington, DC, following the death of George Floyd last week, according to a statement from the Secret Service.
The criteria is very clear. If you're part of the outgroup, you get banned, if you're part of the fargroup nobody cares, if you're part of the ingroup you get a signal boost. It's basic human tribal dynamics that we've understood for decades. It explains almost all of the data we've observed so far about which high profile figures do or do not get banned.
Hmm, that sounds a whole lot like the basis for banings of Parler. Inability/unwillingness to moderate such things effectively.

In the end this is all about some virtue signaling towards their own employees (so that they don't start quitting and are not unhappy) and about money.
> Hypothetically, how would you go about staying online completely independently?

Off the top of my head, things like IPFS (InterPlanetary File System) or the blockchain
Did anyone here actually use Parler? I installed it, and as a new user the default experience is basically a Twitter clone, but with only prominent right wing celebrities like Sean Hannitty.

I didn’t see any hateful trending topics here. My personal opinion is that it seems Parler is getting somewhat screwed here.

Sure, maybe there was some hateful content somewhere, but it certainly wasn’t being promoted to new users. Every online site has people trolling and spewing hate, but Parler is a tiny site with minimal funding.

I get that people want a scapegoat, but I do not think this is constructive.
> This becomes a problem when multi-billion dollar corporations own the copyright to something. That scale of money wasn’t a thing in the late 1700s when copyright was written into the Constitution.

Don't be confused by the numbers; that scale of money was most definitely a thing in the 1700s. Whether you measure it in 2020 USD or bolts of cloth isn't really relevant.
Gen Z is using Slack, TikTok, Clubhouse to break into venture capital
...If you welcome organized violence at a national scale
All forms of extremism, regardless of political valence, should be deprived of air. Is that consistent enough for you?
IIRC this is what Firefox tries to do -- use the OS decoder. For many reasons it is not a great user experience.
The only logic I can think of is that the equivalent text based emoticons - :), :(, :D, D:, etc - are usually 2 chars.
And yet reading some giant lib.rs is a bigger mess / un-readable than duplicated Go code. I think people gives too much credit to Rust sometimes.

You give some Go and Rust code to some team that never used either language, I can tell you right away that the Rust code will never be properly understand.

Go is easy to read and to maintain, I can't say the same for some Rust code. Go itself has been stable for years, there is no new keyword, std lib is the same, almost no changes ( beside modules ).

When you look at Rust they're adding thing much faster and it feels like C++ at times, the mental overhead to keep up with that is not trivial.
Right, and BLM chanting kill the police, that should be encouraged by twitter and facebook????

Your logic defies me.

Keep on voting for pelosi so she could continue becoming rich off the backs of hardworking americans and eating 10k dollar ice cream
Most customers will probably be insulated from these kinds of decisions due to not hosting hate speech and calls for violence.
My problem sometimes with this line of reasoning is that some rights are more important than others, we've already decided that as a fact.

For instance "Forcing them to host parler would be an egregious violation of their right to choose who they associate with." Is true, but we force companies not to discriminate based on Age, Sex, Religion, etc. So your right of who you can associate with isn't iron clad.

We could just as easily add "Freedom of Expression" to the list of things you can not discriminate against, and suddenly the argument holds no water.

I'm not an American, however I sometimes enjoy the irony of America where one side of the political spectrum will be angry that a bakery is forced to bake a cake for a gay couple, but think it's against the customers rights for AWS to not host content they don't agree with.

Whilst the other thinks the baker should be forced to bake a cake against their will, and AWS is free to drop any business they feel like.
I have my doubts that twitter users calling for burning police stations would not in fact be banned if they caught the eyes of a moderator
And the reason for this is that we now believe that gender and sexual orientation are not subject to conscious thought but are “hard coded” into a person. Whereas political affiliation (and politically motivated acts of violence) are still thought to be choices that can be freely made or changed.
> Until you people go after their peer, right? Then it’s “level3 is a private company”.

Hey, if only the FCC rule that ISPs should be obligated to permit all legal content and applications without discrimination was still in place.

Who are the idiots that got rid of that?
I agree that we as society do not want to outsource censorship to private corporations. Despite that I still think this (namely deplatforming Parler in this moment) is a better outcome for us.

Amazon had to choose between appointing itself a censor or being complicit in fomenting violence via offering their services. Both choices suck, but that's sometimes the way cards lie.

> once people who are plotting bad things all move to end-to-end encrypted platforms like Signal it will be that much more difficult to figure out who the bad people are.

I think society's main problem here is the normalization of conspiratorial thinking and the radicalization that ensues. People have always been able to plot in secret and I'm not worried about law enforcement hypothetically being unable to monitor all wrong-thinkers thoughts in real time.

In some respects I think this recent spate of censorious actions (Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter) could be the ideal outcome in that they've always had the implicit power to censor and the public has pretty much shrugged. If society is now forced to reckon with how much of public life it has ceded to Mr. Zuckerberg's whims all the better. If decentralization comes to the web, and tech monopolies and oligopolies are cracked open to competition I will shed no tears.
The funny thing is that Section 230 was added to _encourage_ moderation as part of the Communications Decency Act.

The historical context is that prior to 230, imperfect moderation would be used as proof that a service could moderate but chose not to. This created an incentive to architecturally design systems in a way that made moderation impossible (or at least strongly encouraged services to pretend moderation was impossible). So Congress enacted Section 230, so partial moderation wouldn't be turned against you.

Kind of funny in this context. But attempts at moderation, even bad ones, are very much in line with the history of the bill. And of course, we're talking about AWS's private right to associate with whom they want, not government action. 230 doesn't really enter into it except as a metaphor of sorts.
Chances are, Parler has had numerous warnings. AWS would not spring this on a customer without forewarning.
just keep pushing people into corners, surely that will help to calm things down.
I ran a very open forum with extremely light moderation for almost 2 decades and it started out very normal; It was spun off of famous tech bloggers website. But it eventually became overrun with the same type of people we're talking about here.

My hosting provider was contacted a few times and I always had to moderate the content, make software changes, etc. The last time I got an abuse notice from them I decided to just pack it in. What I'm saying is this sort of thing is nothing new -- it's just getting a lot of attention now.

> ask yourself if you believe Antifa should be kicked off of every platform they exist on for burning police stations.

If Antifa was planning violent actions on a platform, you can bet their hosting provider would get the same notifications and it would again be up to the provider to decide if they want that liability.
IIRC there's usually a dedicated piece of hardware for h264 encoding in most phones now (not the gpu per se)
The brave browser already has tor integrated into it. Is it really that much of a stretch?
In fact, there's some research about this - https://twitter.com/asbruckman/status/1347987974177357833

It was done back in August last year, so not in response to recent events.

The findings were, essentially, it doesn't reduce the individuals toxicity; it does reduce its spread.
China has them
Should Parler Be Banned?
No seriously how deep does this go? Private internet? Balkanize the world so that the only possible outcome is war?

This isn't being thought through.
"far-right" just to be clear that can mean anything and has throughout history. It also easily flips. The key thing to focus on is "authoritarian" which can occur within any political party.

pmiller2 The fact that youre saying both american parties are right wing is exactly what im trying to point out. The labels are pointless, people just call themselves whatever they want. The actions are the actions.
If the past 12 months has taught me anything it’s that one man’s protest is another man’s riot.
Except these lists have been historically difficult to contest or even figure out if you've been added to one.

>You should know that the government’s summary likely will not include all of its reasons for your placement on the list, and in some cases the government will choose not to provide any summary at all. The government also will not provide you any of the evidence it relied upon in deciding to place you on the list, and it may also withhold information in its possession that undercuts its basis for putting you on the list. Finally, the government does not provide a live hearing at which you could testify or give you an opportunity to cross-examine witnesses against you.

https://www.aclu.org/know-your-rights/what-do-if-you-think-y...
It's always easy to willfully misconstrue what opposition says to justify their silencing. It's exactly what we're seeing at a large scale.
I can't help but wonder if the opposite isn't at play here. It's reasonable that these companies have wanted to dissociate with Parler or other specific extremist groups but were afraid of political retribution from Mr. Trump. In your experience, did those same private businesses curry favor with governments by giving their allies preferential treatment?

As 'slippery slope' as this all feels, I'd personally rather the government not get involved in these private business dealings unless they feel there is a monopoly/oligopoly at foot.
Don't they get most of their hardware off eBay these days? (Not that I'm incredibly familiar with that space - I'm more interested in serious redundancy for small important files.)

Anyway, the government has plenty of experience handling terrorists dealing in cash. It doesn't need to be perfect.
Quite the contrary. If anything, the coverage did not show the full story. The majority of these people were out for blood. They erected hanging stations. The fought with the police. This was no demonstration. These people were to overturn the election and hurt or kill anyone who got in their way. Free speech decidedly does not protect this.
A private business can choose to do business with anyone they choose or to not do business with you. It would be different if the government was making these sorts of decisions.
When did you become the official judge of who is a terrorist? What happens when you're walking to the store one day, a protest passes by, and you no longer can fly ever again because you were identified on camera in a protest? "But I was just talking to the store!" Sorry, you cannot defend yourself against this because there no longer is any due process. You were on camera and that's the entire process. That part of your life that involves flying is now over regardless of your (non-existent) level of involvement in the protest.

You really should be careful what you wish for because at this rate, you're probably going to get it and much more of it than you ever imagined.
It's not their platform, they don't get to see how it is moderated.

We do, the people. You know those things we pass called laws? Yeah that determines how moderation needs to happen. Not other companies.
The police murders occurred before 2020, so they can't have occurred during the protests I'm talking about. That seems pretty darn simple.

> Consequently, the media mislabeling of the reign of terror campaign this summer doesn’t legitimize destroying communities because a few people were pissed off and corporations attended to add an air of legitimacy to it.

Engaging with any subjective representation of the protests I am talking about is outside the scope of what I'm willing to discuss—for those who've been subjected to it, I can't compete with the right-wing media's firehose of disinformation. My point about fatalities per participant-day stands as a metric of the violence during last summer's protests compared to the riot last Wednesday, and you can take it or leave it.
I think it's fair to say that Facebook/Twitter/AWS/whatever has been more lenient in favor of these "Capitol people" and Trump than ISIS.

Do you think Twitter would deliberate days/months/years to ban an ISIS account?
"Replaces" is a strong word. Deno is an attempt to make a better headless JS runtime given years of hindsight. Most of the things it does differently are welcome, but a few are controversial. And that's not even getting into whether or not it'll be able to hit the critical threshold of adoption. It's way too early to know the outcome yet.
Agree with you both. I have 3 kettlebells (1, 1.5 and 2 poods) and a yoga mat right outside my back door and it eliminates all my excuses. Even on low motivation mornings I can still bang out 40 swings and some snatches. And it's the perfect thing before coffee/work.
No, it really isn't. It's both. That you choose to believe that "far right" is some ineffable quality does not mean others may not 'ef' it.

In all honesty, both major American parties are quite right wing. We just have the ultra right party, and the slightly less right wing party.
I personally don't want government to mandate speech policies on private companies and think people should be allowed to join websites that enforce values they like and agree with. My woodworking forum should be allowed to have a "no politics" rule. A Christian dating site should be allowed to ban atheists, like me. A social media app should be allowed to ban hate speech -- I don't want government making it illegal for there to be communities without hate speech.

Unless you're suggesting government should just ban hate speech? I don't favor that, either, but maybe I should ask for clarity here.
Calling a bunch of unarmed morons taking selfies inside the Capitol building an "insurrection" is totally absurd.

It's as though you think that it's a videogame, like whoever has that building has all the power.

LOL!
>If you aren't referring ... deplatforming

You are misrepresenting me. I said I didn't criticize their deplatforming, not that I am not commenting on deplatforming.

My point, since we seem to be intentionally missing it to instead construct strawmans (prions comment) or throw around accusations of bad faith (your comment), is that there is a danger in turning deplatforming into a weapon that criminals can use against people who are unable to afford to hire teams of effective moderators.
What engineering team is going to want to tie themselves deeply to a system that builds a reputation for kicking clients off with a 1 day notice?
> Mainstream conservatives haven't been deplatformed.

But clearly, they have been. 74 million Americans voted for President Trump in the recent election, and now a bunch of techies in California are unilaterally saying that they shouldn't have a platform, and giving their support to the other side of the political spectrum. This doesn't look good for the average Republican or Conservative.
How many violent attacks have resulted from activity on Facebook?
"Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia"
Not sure I follow but I am intrigued. OK well given that the least I can bet is $1, I will bet $1.
This move will lead to new innovations,say a new network service designed that will be bulletproof against the big cloud providers or even the pipe providers(AT&T,etc), something like P2P or dark net.

I'm expecting telecom vendors to chime in to cut off the network for the voices they do not like.

I used to think telegram/signal are designed for some other countries, never thought it could be useful for USA where free speech is guaranteed by the constitutions, no more.
sedition.

Big loaded words. This was a peasant revolt of gas station employees - that did a lot less damage than the riots in San Francisco last summer.
Yes! Looks droidlike.

[0]: https://news.gab.com/2021/01/09/gabs-statement-on-apple-and-...
You can still say whatever you want, you just can't compel others (including businesses) to assist you in conveying your speech. This is really basic stuff, it is surprising how difficult many otherwise smart people are finding it.
So the US gov is now going to start competing with news outlets? Are you high or just full of it?
Well that's embarassing. Updated, thanks.
Call me cynical, but the short term calculus of the tech companies involved seems pretty clear: after the Democrats have now won the Senate too, they are very quick to block Trump, Parler etc. So they are no better than the Republicans who supported or condoned Trump's antics so far and are only now discovering their conscience when it has become clear that his grip on power is slipping. The proverbial rats getting off the sinking ship...
I would note using WS_EX_TOPMOST may flag your executable for upload and further analysis depending on what game you are playing...
I bought his early work Burmese Days as a very inexpensive eBook about ten days ago. Definitely feels autobiographical and those experiences were precursors for his later beliefs. He really was ahead of his time.
To be fair, rioters and protestors (left and right) have stormed several state legislatures, federal builds, and razed many buildings this past year, with a lot of the country saying it was justified.

People are more shocked about the *reason* they stormed the Capitol than the violence. If women in pink hats stormed the Capitol during the Kavanaugh confirmation vote (well they did, but not in enough numbers to overwhelm security), the parties would be having polar opposite reactions. GOP saying it was a coup and democrats saying it was justified outrage.

These people don't realize they were pawns in Trump's bad faith attempt to steal the election. They believe they are doing the right thing. *That doesn't justify their actions, but it explains their actions.*
Apparently the cop that shot and killed an unarmed women didn’t get the memo.
As long as those definitions never change, which of course they constantly do. By today's standards, the wildly popular TV show 'Friends' is full of hate speech. Who knows what will be considered hate speech tomorrow.
The payment networks have been banning risky clients for many decades. Many other businesses do the same, so I don’t think this is any new precedent.

And it’s trivial for someone kicked off of the big social media networks to make there own website and post whatever they want.
Kinda. I mean... look, they're just a partisan site. There's nothing new about that, their hook was that they looked like twitter and weren't a vbulletin or whatever.

It wasn't supposed to be like this. If it was just a bunch of right wingers hanging out and complaining, akin to the left-wingers you find on /r/politics or whatever, then no one would care.

But right wing grievance shifted over the Trump years into explicitly violent and insurrectionist rhetoric and imagery. And as of Wednesday that's no longer a theoretical threat.
Being that we are animals, this trait is not restricted to humans. Animals don't observe much when another type of animal huts a different animal but may come to the defense of its own kind, if related.
I’m not sure this argument holds in general.

For example, you could change your religion and it would still be illegal to discriminate on that basis.
The exact same argument could be applied regarding free speech, mind.

While the government is the only entity /legally bound/ to not restrict speech, it is also untenable to have a government that cannot touch it presiding over an oligarchy of corporations that are wholly censorious. If free speech is critical to a democratic society (which it is), it is necessary that corporations do what they can to uphold it.
> This was a coordinated attack by the tech giants to kill competition in the market place.

Nah, I don't buy that. The tech giants are booting Parler off their platforms because it's unprofitable. Imagine being Apple and choosing to keep Parler's app online when Amazon has booted them off. Or vice versa. You don't want to be the "last man standing" and subject to, effectively, a boycott of your services, or at the very least a bunch of terrible PR.
> Parler is like a video game with all the cheat codes on; it will entertain them at first, but they'll get bored quickly.

When I was much younger - like, 8-9-10yo, PC games were hard for me: younger age, smaller-mind. I’d use my limited time on my 28.8 dialup to get cheat codes and burn hours of my life having fun in the single-player skirmish/instant-action-mode (as opposed to campaign/story mode - this was before always-on internet and built-in matchmaking, ofc) - and I never got bored of it. I didn’t get tired of winning. Not that “winning” was the objective, but just blowing stuff up in Streets-of-SimCity or spamming the easter-egg nuke-troopers in Age of Empires was enough to entertain me.

I didn’t stop cheating at single-player PC games until after I was old enough to understand how to actually play the game and started to appreciate the challenge and enjoy the satisfaction of overcoming that challenge.

As a comparison - I see similarities with the types of people on Parler: there’s no appreciation of /the system/ - just a desire to be-on-top, stay-on-top, and have fun blowing shit up. They either don’t enjoy “the game” or they’re unable to play it, so they’ve invented their own game. Hence, the “like playing chess with a pigeon” idiom: shitting on the chessboard is more fun for them than playing by the rules.
Digital Design Course from Harvey Mudd College on EdX
Which has always been the case for fonts. Just because I write a letter ‘T’, there’s no guarantee how you’ll see it. It’ll look very different in Windings.
absolutely agree. In this scenario though, it appears AWS and Parler were in communication for weeks prior to this according to the letter in the OP.
The market didn't decide anything, it's not like any stock prices are reacting to this speech being allowed by these corporations or not. These decisions are made by a handful of unaccountable, anonymous people in closed rooms, hiding by the institutions they work for.
This is absolutely as close as anyone should come to arguing against removing Trump. Once you're inciting violence free speech goes out the window -- and free speech here also gives companies the right to block you.