skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> In all the years of human history before social media, there have been countless examples of insurrections, of hateful acts inspired by a few, of coups, of routine crimes, of widely believed mistruths, etc. So obviously individuals in those societies were able to communicate and organize without social media (and in many cases without any electronic communication at all). Which means that access to social media is not a necessary condition for bad events to happen or bad social phenomena to spread. And therefore these things will find a way to continue to happen even if all social media communication were terminated.

Not to the same extent. (Your argument offers a false dichotomy.)

With terrorism, insurrections, and so on (coordinated crimes in general), being able to slow down, monitor, and respond to communication flows can make the difference between a tragedy and an intervention.

The idea of 'slowing things down' can also apply to any information source, such as business news or the political rumor-mill. Do you want recent, vetted, and contextualized information? In practice, pick two.
> One reason Wikipedia was able to grow so quickly was because of its scale.

I've carefully studied all three definitions of "scale" my dictionary offers up, and come to the conclusion that this sentence either means absolutely nothing ("It is big because it is big"), or something really strange ("Wikipedia grew because of its plate-like skin coverings").
From what Corey Quinn is saying, they have to be doing something really, really bad to get kicked off AWS, and no other host would abide it. Self-hosting wouldn't help them either, since their ISP could just yank the plug for the same reasons.

For reference, AWS hosts The National Enquirer, which threatened to leak, er, extremely sensitive photos of Jeff Bezos.
And for the problem of poor posture from "computer crouch", the simple answer is the machine in your gym labeled "rear delt"[0], often combined with "pec fly". Build up your strength on the rear delt machine and you are building exactly the muscles that restore your natural posture.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WP4mBAg3Ng
You can look for any slightly controversial company and find that their wiki pages skimp on the details of such controversies and minimize them as mostly resolved
Influenza does the same: https://www.the-scientist.com/features/can-the-flu-and-other...

These unprecedented restrictions on human freedom (Lockdown) are probably also a factor in pyschosis - limiting people from regular socialisation, exercise etc.
Some people define generally reprehensible as having bad hygiene. Should that be a bannable offense? You cant just ban people on the basis of subject terms like this
I tend to look at things from an individual scale because I don't have the tools to do otherwise. Methodological individualism is my hammer, and so everything looks like a nail.
I have, and it becomes a first amendment issue when you build the case, like I did, and like everyone who’s tracking this. I hope you can acknowledge that. And surprisingly, it didn’t take me that long to put that together, maybe 3 min lol.

And let me add, this issue is certainly from a more direct angle than the one all these companies have taken: silencing a group of people even though you’re unable to directly link “incite violence “ to all events, all people, and all platforms unilaterally.

Cheers to the future removal of 230! That’s coming, no matter what’s next (AFAIK, both sides are for that) Unless of course... a back deal has somehow been made which we don’t know about.
Okay, I stand corrected, thanks. Also, what a stupid idiot that man is.
There is a consistent logic to Trump and his followers: they are never to blame. Direct quote: "I don't take any responsibility at all"
I can imagine several scenarios in which BTC goes to zero.

Some have even happened.

You lose your key, or get hacked, or send to the wrong address and everything you invested is gone.

Oh, and if someone manages to reverse SHA256, or finds a vulnerability in the public key scheme it all becomes worthless instantly... That is if they don't keep it secret and milk the whole thing for everything it's worth.
> "Your users committed an act of insurrection against the current legitimate democratic government"

If this is the bar, then it was met by a coup attempt organized on whatsapp in 2016. There's nothing whatabout about it.
They could certainly do a world better, but neither were as bad as Parler who basically laid out guidelines but made zero effort to enforce them.
Every one of these insurrectionists was carrying a smartphone. The FBI knows the identity of everyone in the area; it’s just a question of determining which ones illegally entered the Capitol grounds.
A private corporation is not the government, they can stop you from using their platform, not sending you to a "re-education camp".
A protests of 1000s(tens?) of people had some unknown (be honest) number of violent actors that resulted in the death of two people. We have no means of verifying that those who committed violence did so at the behest of bad actors on any given App. We can speculate or let the media speculate for us. Speculation nonetheless.

One would think that a community so dependent on data would require it.

Would you have felt more safe at that protest or walking through a rough area of Chicago on any given day last week? [0]

Is this really worth the slippery slope we are now walking toward? I don't know. At least not yet.

[0] https://home.chicagopolice.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/1_...
Terrible precedent.

Even the argument that "private companies don't have to respect free speech", though one that seems disingenuous as most people making it weren't saying so with cases like Masterpiece Cake Shop v CCRC, holds little water when there is no public square alternative.

Because of the possibility of people saying things FAANG don't approve of, they are entirely deplatforming a platform.

How can they argue that they're anything but publishers, if they boot websites for simply having the potential to allow speech they disapprove of?
One example is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Marxism_conspiracy_th..., which is about a term called "Cultural Marxism" which has been used by some mainstream right-leaning people as well as some right-leaning extremists (particularly in the past). If you look at the article itself, it titles this article as a "conspiracy theory" and specifically features the conspiracy theory version of "Cultural Marxism" in its opening sentences. However, the term as commonly used in modern times, does not refer to that particular conspiracy theory but is more like a shorthand for leftist ideology that features collectivism, particularly when it infiltrates academic institutions (and not the notion of a coordinated mass conspiracy).

From a quick Google search, I was able to find other articles that draw this distinction clearly (example https://spectator.us/whats-wrong-cultural-marxism/). However, the Wikipedia article doesn't draw this distinction well, and it seems intent on casting the phrase "Cultural Marxism" as racist, and so it features the worst interpretation of it. It sources articles that are also written primarily to repudiate right-wing political figures or intellectuals like Jordan Peterson. The related debate and edit wars are apparent when you look at the "Talk" page for this article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Cultural_Marxism_conspira.... Note that the Talk page mentions the article is controversial, is in dispute, that there have been attempts to recruit editors to change the article, there have been circular sources introduced, and so forth.

That's just one example, but if you dig deep enough into any topic that has a left- and right- perspective and a Wikipedia article, you'll find the same. Wikipedia is, in my view, developing a US-centric English-centric left-leaning bias. All that said, I still love Wikipedia and will continue to use it everyday. I just worry that like all human-centric institutions, it is itself a target, a theater of battle in the on-going ideological wars.
The US does not have any net neutrality laws that would make the posed scenario illegal.

But! That brings up a great point, because I certainly am a proponent of net neutrality laws: would/should such laws not also apply to major internet infrastructure providers such as AWS, thus making it illegal for them to block/ban sites at their leisure?
I'm not sold on the technology yet either, but this company has built over 135 batter swap stations in China. [1]

For reference, that compares to about 500 supercharger stations in the country.

While building swapping stations does seem a hard problem, it doesn't seem insurmountable given the potential benefits to consumers.

1. https://www.nio.com/blog/brief-history-battery-swapping
These tech companies have always removed calls to violence. I lost count of how many FB groups have been shut down. I just don't see this being anti-right as much as it's anti violence.

Maybe if BLM folks made their own app and started doxing Twitter employees that wouldn't get shut down, but I guess we'll never know.
This seems like cherry-picking. Creating a narrative where some recent events are dependent on a political event from the seventies seems suspect. Just to pick a specific example, the US has had depressions/recessions almost from inception, most of which make 2008 look mild. Also you left out that in your alternative narrative you would probably be typing on a larger, slower and heavier phone (or laptop).
The OP used them as an example of how “the left” would feel if a cause they cared about was censored. I meant it only to show how silly the comparisons was to me. There simply isn’t a comparion to storming the capitol to try to stop the democratic process. The CHAZ was not BLM “ceding from the union,” they tried some poorly thought out experiment in no policing.

I’m not judging the entirety of a Maga movement, or the right, or even a “stop the steal” crowd. I am judging those who stormed the capitol and those who directly egged them on, who are being deplatformed in the article.

> We have a lot of problems. The primary one is our inability to see that they are spread evenly across the ideological spectrum.

Another contender for primary problem is the widespread use of false equivalencies and “both sides” to excuse whatever is inconvenient without nuance.
This is not a good argument, as it implies that if science finds a way to change sexual preference then the protection should be revoked.

Also political views can not be changed easily either, it requires exposure to facts during a long time in a way that would circumvent brain's desire to be right.

But more importantly the right of companies to refuse service as a substitution to real justice is not going to fix society, it will only make things worse when bad guys get the power. Justice requires rules, not arbitrary actions by private companies.
> I agree that Parler was deplorable and needed to go, but I keep seeing this "private companies can do whatever they want" argument, and it bothers me.

It bothers me too.

But I'm fine with supporting this temporarily, at least through the inauguration which is likely the highest-risk target.

For the near future, the benefits of disrupting the rioters outweigh any of my other concerns. A month or two of emergency measures isn't a big deal.

When I feel like America is peaceful again, then I'm willing to let my guard down. For now, this clear radicalization needs to stop at any costs.

----------

Over the long term: it is clear that both the left and the right are moving to break up the big internet companies with regards to antitrust, which is probably a stronger long-term solution to this situation.

These companies never should have gotten this powerful in the first place, but here we are. Might as well take advantage of it while we're dealing with insurrectionists.
The same type of person who is downvoting me now
Most domestic terrorism leads are surfaced through confidential informants / undercover agents. The number of groups planning / with the capabilities to commit terror are small. The Michigan kidnapping plot was effectively a bunch of guys with almost no skills, they were recruiting an "explosives expert" and it was an easy in for an undercover FBI agent to infiltrate the group.
Amazon didn’t break terms of service, but Parler did by not moderating their platform.

Amazon, Google, and Apple merely terminated their service because Parler violated TOS. It is perfectly reasonable.
Here is an example for people asking for one.

As an experiment I tried to get some fairly innocuous numbers into participation in Australia sport.

There is a big survey done in Australia, the Ausplay survey:

https://www.clearinghouseforsport.gov.au/

They have extensive tables on adult participation.

Two editors would not let this data into the sport in Australia article. The reason was fairly obvious, it shows that soccer/football is the most played team sport in Australia. Roy Morgan, a statistical agency also had similar figures. Some Australians don't like the fact that soccer/football is by far the most played team sport in Australia according to to the Ausplay Survey and Roy Morgan.

There was much time spent in the talk pages spent asking these two what would be acceptable for quoting these sporting statistics. The answer was nothing.

If you can't get fairly unobjectionable material like that into wikipedia what else is being blocked?
(I can't see the flagged post that's at the top of this subthread so if this is a bit out of context that is why)

If the baker thinks it's a message of sin, then what? It's not like selling them a room at a hotel or any other standard thing. This is a custom crafted item and message that they are being asked to help propagate, and one that they disagree with.
I don't use Parler, but this is nuts.

AWS, Google, Apple, Twitter are private (sector) businesses, and it's fine for them to do what they want. That being said, there are two issues here.

One, is that even the staunchest free market advocates acknowledge that monopolies are constructs by which markets fail the public, and we designate trust busting as a necessary function of the state. This is yet another action in a series among many that demonstrates that not only are these companies beyond any reasonable threshold of what would historically constitute a monopoly, but that they repeatedly act in collusion with one another in service of specific objectives. These companies have the capability to effectively lock competitors out of even getting their footing. "If a baker can refuse to bake a cake for a gay couple, what's wrong with this?" Well, Twitter is already an effective monopoly in its space, but Parler is created as a miniscule competitor. It has virtually no chance, but it carves out a space for itself. Well Apple and Google remove it from their marketplaces, and the apk is removed from major hosts. So now Parler needs to build its own smartphones, OSes, and marketplaces. Well now AWS says they won't host their servers, so Parler needs to build and maintain their own server infrastructure. What's next, credit cards refuse to process their transactions, banks refuse to serve them? You're okay with this?

Secondly, do we approve of the existing monopolies doing this? Over the last few months, militant leftists have caused an estimated 5 billion in damages, taken over police stations, burned down the Minneapolis police station, attempted to burn down the federal courthouse in Portland, set up two anarchist insurrection zones which resulted in multiple murders and rapes, as well as racially segregated spaces and speaking areas, taken down century old statues of Lincoln and Grant, among others, have beat multiple business owners to within inches of their lives, destroyed countless businesses, many of which have no insurance. But this is where the buck stops? A free speech platform that hosted some of the conversations that led to a single (completely unacceptable) act by a group? I observe a group of radical leftists on Facebook, that, in regards to the storming of the Capitol building, have said "do not question their tactics, just their motives." This is a group on Facebook that doesn't think there's a problem with storming the Capitol or threatening the lives of the Congress, just that they disagree with the motives. That's apparently the case for Facebook as well, as well as the rest of these platforms.
I agree the numbers are (relatively) few, but those very few people are exactly the people we're discussing. How do you integrate them?

We're not talking about Trump voters as a whole. They're welcome to believe they were robbed, the same way many Democrats did in 2000 (hell, in 2016 too). I'm confident the vast majority of them will find a way to live with it.

Trump didn't lose the vote because of fraud, he lost because higher voter participation via mail-in benefitted Biden.

Democrats aren't radicalizing Trump supporters and it's bizarre to claim they are.
Google is (still) your friend.

https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/ksdfne/why_...

https://coingeek.com/bitfinex-ny-attorney-general-extends-su...
ATT and Verizon are consumer service providers. If they block parler that will be unacceptable. AWS is just a cloud vendor. Parler can choose to work with any number of other vendors or run their own servers. It's not the same comparison.
Somehow ISPs are going to use this as an argument against https etc.
You fundamentally misunderstand the political divide, if you think that HuffPo is not viewed as "spewing hatred and fascism".

It's not hatred towards things you like, or what you view as fascism, but I can assure you that the viewpoints it espouses are seen as fascist and oppressive to those who disagree.
You're commenting is very uncivil and doesn't belong here.
First off, we've gone over this many times before in net neutrality arguments, but ISPs are quite different from websites. Most americans only have access to 1 or 2 ISP, but anyone can create and host their own website.

Next up, look at the other side of the equation. Are you ok with websites banning child pornography? What about ISIS recruitment videos? Now, what about doxxing people or posts from QAnon recruiting people to raid the Capitol? Clearly you accept a line somewhere, you wouldn't want to live in a completely lawless internet where AWS hosts child pornography, you just don't agree with the exact position of the line then?

Yes they have power, but they're not stupid, they'll never ban half the internet, it just doesn't make sense, either monetarily, morally or from a popularity point of view. I personally don't buy any of the slippery slope arguments, they seem to be thrown there by people who just want the line to be in a slightly different position.
Free speech is about it being free from the government (congress shall pass no law), not about me or AWS or Twitter being forced to listen to you, or to repeat what you say.
Yeah, don't interpret my comment as a belief that Trump was unaware and didn't know anything could happen. You would need to be dumb to believe that, for example, he didn't know anything about the Proud Boys or QAnon as he claimed.
Can't tell if this is a joke

If not, already cursed by its name unfortunately.
Getting a Gig: A Guide
I will not tolerate your sarcasm... Out of tolerance.
It is entirely telling what they could get away with under Republicans.
When you are the main defacto means of deploying web platforms it essentially does amount to cencorship. The irony of the comparison to twitter is that parlor IS trying to be a twitter competitor thus preventing twitter from falling into the same classification of being too big to be non competitive
There are good reasons to believe that adage is apocryphal. How do you square that with e.g. the mere exposure theory, in which the very act of seeing something makes you more accepting of it? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere-exposure_effect
If the goal is to deradicalize then getting the radicals out of the police force seems like a great starting point, no?
If it's based on current ML it's not. Otherwise you can't claim it is sentient just because it can process information. How do you know if your photocopier isnt sentient?
It's also the day there was an insurrection/invasion of the capitol to prevent the Democratic process. This was fueled by the unfettered calls to violence on Parler.

If you're going to pick the events of the day, it's best to mention both.
>so it's okay because private companies can do whatever they want

The point is they can't do whatever they want, just like Google/FB/Amazon actually can't do whatever they want.

They can only do it if it's the will of the majority of their customers, employees and shareholders. Jack Dorsey or Jeff Bezos can't make decisions like this unilaterally without the support of all those parties.
I am surprised that the comments haven't mentioned the role of SEO in Wikipedia's growth and defensibility.

Wikipedia's habit of deep interlinking helped it rank back in the early aughts when the SEO rules were rather simple. Add to that the subdomain-driven localization strategy and many other moves that were considered SEO best practices back in those years when the on-page factors used to matter.

But that was just the start. Wikipedia killed it in SEO when it was easy to do so, but it also did one other thing that most SEO-driven sites (eg: About) didn't do correctly - it cared deeply about the content quality and also resisted to run ads (anyone remember Jason Calacanis' articles on how they are leaving $100m on the table? See [1]). So when Panda came around, Google correctly rewarded Wikipedia with #1 rankings for over 50% of its terms (!!), and Jason Calacanis had to shut down Mahalo which got destroyed by Panda.

Wikipedia's dominance continues because it's basically impossible to overcome its lead in inbound links and domain authority. Add to that a surprisingly under-the-radar company culture which has avoided any major blow ups despite its community wielding so much leverage over the world's education and having to make a lot of difficult calls on a daily basis.

Well done.

[1] https://calacanis.com/2006/10/28/wikipedia-leaves-100m-on-th...
Yes. One of founders talks about the two problems with IPFS they saw that led them to build it in this comment from a past thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24626748
Man you deleted the part about the leftist straw man lol!!

You lost me honest to God, and I am going to leave this here... I still stand by my original statement, acknowledging my choice of words isn’t perfect but the main idea is there. And thanks for watching the videos, and for the short discourse. It’s been fun, God Bless!
The conservatives aren't the ones flipping here though. They're complaining, not suing.

The flip is coming from people who opposed "private companies owe no one their services" when it was Masterpiece Cake Shop, but now love it.
The exact same thing can be said about Twitter where the left actively cancels opposite ideas