rigorousintuition.ca

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/johnpaczkowski/amazon-parler-aws

Amazon Is Booting Parler Off Of Its Web Hosting Service

Amazon notified Parler that it would be cutting off the social network favored by conservatives and extremists from its cloud hosting service Amazon Web Services, according to an email obtained by BuzzFeed News. The suspension, which will go into effect on Sunday just before midnight, means that Parler will be unable to operate and will go offline unless it can find another hosting service.

People on Parler used the social network to stoke fear, spread hate, and coordinate the insurrection at the Capitol building on Wednesday. The app has recently been overrun with death threats, celebrations of violence, and posts encouraging “Patriots” to march on Washington, DC with weapons on January 19, the day before the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden.

In an email obtained by BuzzFeed News, an AWS Trust and Safety team told Parler Chief Policy Officer Amy Peikoff that the calls for violence propagating across the social network violated its terms of service. Amazon said it was unconvinced that the service’s plan to use volunteers to moderate calls for violence and hate speech would be effective.

“Recently, we’ve seen a steady increase in this violent content on your website, all of which violates our terms," the email reads. "It’s clear that Parler does not have an effective process to comply with the AWS terms of service.”

An Amazon spokesperson declined to comment on the suspension.

In a post on Saturday evening following publication of this story, Parler CEO John Matze, who did not return a request for comment from BuzzFeed News, said it is possible the social network will be unavailable on the internet for up to a week as we rebuild from scratch."




"This was a coordinated attack by the tech giants to kill competition in the market place," he wrote on Parler. "We were too successful too fast."

On Parler, reaction to the impending ban was swift and outraged with some discussing violence against Amazon. "It would be a pity if someone with explosives training were to pay a visit to some AWS data centers," one person wrote.



Amazon's move comes after Apple banned Parler from its App Store on Saturday afternon, after the platform failed to introduce a moderation plan to protect public safety. On Friday, Apple gave Parler 24 hours to mitigate the "planning of illegal and dangerous activities" occurring on its service or face expulsion, BuzzFeed News first reported. Google has also suspended Parler from its Google Play app store.

On Saturday, ahead of Apple's expected banning from the App Store, people rushed to download Parler's app, making it the most downloaded free app. While people will still be able to use Parler on their iPhones after the App Store ban, the social media company will not be able to distribute updates through Apple's services.

Amazon's move, however, will remove the infrastructure from which Parler operates.

Parler, which was launched in 2018, has become a safe haven for people banned by popular sites including Facebook and Twitter. The Henderson, Nevada–based company has billed itself as a free speech alternative to mainstream social networks and taken a more relaxed approach to content moderation, attracting conspiracy theorists, hate group members, and right-wing activists who have openly incited violence.

Recent threads on Parler have called for the execution of Vice President Mike Pence and encouraged the conspiracy theory that left-wing antifa activists were behind Wednesday’s events.



Republican lawmakers including Sen. Ted Cruz and Congressman Devin Nunes as well as President Donald Trump’s family members and surrogates have all established Parler accounts, and have publicly encouraged their supporters to join them there. So too have many figures in conservative media.

Amazon's email to Parler also contained examples from the platform of calls for the assassinations of lawmakers, members of the media, and activists.



“[W]e cannot provide services to a customer that is unable to effectively identify and remove content that encourages or incites violence against others,” the email continues. “Because Parler cannot comply with our terms of service and poses a very real risk to public safety, we plan to suspend Parler’s account effective Sunday, January 10th, at 11:59PM PST.”

On Amazon Web Services, Parler had gone from negligible spend to paying more than $300,000 a month for hosting, according to multiple sources.

Amazon employees had publicly called for an AWS ban of Parler, and a Change.org petition calling for the same thing had amassed thousands of signatures this week. Multiple employees had also filed internal complaints to AWS management citing hate speech on the social network.

Here is Amazon’s letter to Parler in full.

What timorous beasts you are. Enjoy the corporate nirvana, after all, you asked for it.

I move away from the mic to breathe in. Discorporate and come with me.

FZ: The first word in this song is "discorporate." It means to leave your body

Discorporate and come with me
Shifting, drifting
Cloudless, starless
Velvet valleys and a sapphire sea, wah wah

Unbind your mind, there is no time
To lick your stamps and paste them in
Discorporate and we will begin, wah wah
("Flower Power" sucks)

Diamonds on velvets on goldens on Vixen
On Comet and Cupid on Donner and Blitzen
On up and away and afar and a go-go
Escape from the weight of your corporate logo

Unbind your mind, there is no time
To lick your stamps
And paste them in
Discorproate and we'll begin

Freedom, freedom, kindly loving
You'll be absolutely free
Only if you want to be

Harvey » Sun Jan 10, 2021 11:55 am wrote:What timorous beasts you are. Enjoy the corporate nirvana, after all, you asked for it.

How do you mean this? I see no indication yet that metalgongfu2 expressed support for (or opposition to) "corporate nirvana" in the original post, or even a clear stance on the move against Parler. I see only he posted two news items, including Amazon's letter to Parler.

But perhaps you use the second person in the sense of "you blocks, you stones, you less than senseless things."

You know what's funny? If the recipients of massive federal contracts, subsidy and protection known as Amazon, Facebook, Google, etc., were nationalized, the First Amendment would apply.

And if the yahoo brigade had a clue -- well, may as well say, if my grandmother were a train -- or anyway, if they had genuine political sophistication beyond their evident sense of brute force and transgression, they would have known to avoid this host (among others) since 2010, when Amazon summarily pulled hosting services for Wikileaks, effectively on command from the U.S. govt. (I think they were the ones who got a letter from Sen. Lieberman at the time?)

ON EDIT: Of course, this thought wouldn't occur to a billionaire like Rebekah Mercer, who is used to having her money translate directly into action and power.

Parler has the money from the Mercers & co. to look for an alternate ISP, but they may not find one currently willing to host their site in the United States.

Anyway, did Parler meet the yell fire in a theater standard, and what does that mean? (ON EDIT: The question is not rhetorical and this debate is real to me.)

Three Generations of a Hackneyed Apologia for Censorship Are Enough

SEPTEMBER 19, 2012 BY KEN WHITE
https://www.popehat.com/2012/09/19/thre ... re-enough/

In her Los Angeles Times opinion piece justifying prosecution of the author of the "Innocence of Muslims" video on YouTube, Sarah Chayes opens exactly the way I've come to expect:

In one of the most famous 1st Amendment cases in U.S. history, Schenck vs. United States, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. established that the right to free speech in the United States is not unlimited. "The most stringent protection," he wrote on behalf of a unanimous court, "would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic."

Holmes' famous quote is the go-to argument by appeal to authority for anyone who wants to suggest that some particular utterance is not protected by the First Amendment. Its relentless overuse is annoying and unpersuasive to most people concerned with the actual history and progress of free speech jurisprudence. People tend to cite the "fire in a crowded theater" quote for two reasons, both bolstered by Holmes' fame. First, they trot out the Holmes quote for the proposition that not all speech is protected by the First Amendment. But this is not in dispute. Saying it is not an apt or persuasive argument for the proposition that some particular speech is unprotected, any more than saying "well, some speech is protected by the First Amendment" is a persuasive argument to the contrary. Second, people tend to cite Holmes to imply that there is some undisclosed legal authority showing that the speech they are criticizing is not protected by the First Amendment. This is dishonest at worst and unconvincing at best. If you have a pertinent case showing that particular speech falls outside the First Amendment, you don't have to rely on a 90-year-old rhetorical flourish to support your argument.

Holmes' quote is the most famous and pervasive lazy cheat in American dialogue about free speech. This post is not about fisking Sarah Chayes; her column deserves it, but I will leave it to another time. This post is about putting the Holmes quote in context, and explaining why it adds nothing to a First Amendment debate.

Holmes' Full-Throated Approval For Suppression of Wartime Dissent

Holmes' famous quote comes in the context of a series of early 1919 Supreme Court decisions in which he endorsed government censorship of wartime dissent — dissent that is now clearly protected by subsequent First Amendment authority.

The three cases in question arose from socialist criticism of conscription during World War One. The criticism at issue, to modern tastes, was a clearly protected and rather mild expression of opinion. Here's what got Socialist Party of America chair Charles Schenck prosecuted and imprisoned under the Espionage Act:

continued, festooned with links, and well worth it
https://www.popehat.com/2012/09/19/thre ... re-enough/

Yes, a hundred years ago the example was first used to argue that you can't publish anti-war ideas during wartime. Now you can, sort of. You can yell fire in a crowded theatre.

So it shouldn't be the standard for judging free speech. How about 'clear and present danger.' Like, if I drive around the course in my golf cart yelling 'fore!' it might throw the entire country club collectively off its game. This would create a chain reaction, ruined shots lead to ruined business deals. Membership will dwindle. So my free speech has economic implications for the players, but also for the country club.

Who wants to go to a country club with a reputation like that?

Also, meeting the double requirement of intent and potential. If a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound? Who cares?

So the limits of free speech are very difficult to pin down. I do have to say that I disagree with this:

"the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out"

My ideas aren't for sale.

It's not censorship, it's Amazon, a private entity, exercising their right to freedom of association. If they don't want to host Nazis openly planning murder and mayhem they don't have to.

Same principle as people getting booted off this forum for posts that break the rules.

Is the marketplace of ideas a free market? I think it has always been a corporate body.

And if free speech is for sale in the marketplace of ideas, doesn't that make it a commercial endeavor? But free speech and haggling are at cross-purposes. In some cultures, if you don't engage in the haggle ritual, it's considered insulting.

Maybe there is an art to free speech. Freedom of speech as a measure of the skill of the artist. Yelling fire in a crowded theatre could be performance art.

Of course, what is good for the art is bad for the artist. When the speech is free, the artist starves.

Harvey » 11 Jan 2021 02:55 wrote:What timorous beasts you are. Enjoy the corporate nirvana, after all, you asked for it.

Amazon always was the corporate nirvana, as was twitter and whatever else to wanna mention.

The entire web is a corporate thing these days (always was I guess, where does your electricty come from?) Except for odd little hold outs like this and even it has to pay its dues.

BYE PARLER! Here's a heartland requiem for ya.

Good job I don't use Amazon, on principle. I note that Parler is one of the few platforms where you can discuss with Caitlin Johnston or Eva Bartlett without having to wade through a thousand ill informed shit posts. Hell, it's the only place where you could read Eva without her work on Syria being censored. I suppose when that patriot switch is flipped, there's just no flipping it back.

DrEvil » Sun Jan 10, 2021 4:33 pm wrote:It's not censorship, it's Amazon, a private entity, exercising their right to freedom of association. If they don't want to host Nazis openly planning murder and mayhem they don't have to.

Same principle as people getting booted off this forum for posts that break the rules.

Censorship can be a vague term. Your statement would be undisputably accurate if you said that Amazon is not in violation of First Amendment protections, which apply to the state, not to private capitalist businesses. (I question the idea that Amazon or any corporation, especially those in the jumbo class, qualifies as a person with an automatic "right to freedom of association.")

Amazon is one of a very exclusive cartel of companies that now effectively control most of the ability to gain exposure on the Internet for everyone in the United States. What is, in effect, a natural monopoly -- the online public square -- is 80-90 percent owned and controlled by five private for-profit corporations who also strongly influence and indirectly control politics. They are all political donors and major state contractors, recipients of subsidies, beneficiaries of regulatory capture, etc. Most likely several of them originated as covert state ventures. By leaving the Internet in their hands but also maintaining its own reverse power to influence them, even threaten them with potential regulation, the state can in effect have them legally conduct censorship of public debate without being subject to the First Amendment. And, of course, they get to extract enormous profit out of a now mature monopoly or oligopoly market central to the whole society, and to determine its development, always in ways that increase their control and revenues, but are also guided by the particular future-visions of their owners and managers, contrary to any democratic pretense.

It's a separate question what should be done about the Mercer's attempt to break into the cartel by starting a right-wing public square that became a breeding ground for that form of propaganda (fucked up but protected) and also the planning area for last week's attempted fascist coup d'etat. I consider this a serious conundrum and by no means open and shut, for all the usual obvious concerns about regulation of political speech.

I liked this debate on Katie Halper, with Shahid Buttar taking the more open free-speech approach against two others with intelligent renderings of their more strict positions. The link goes to 1:32:03, where this part started within a much longer show. (I haven't seen the part with Zephyr Teachout.)

https://youtu.be/yPJnqADVPno?t=5523

metalgongu: Can we change the thread title to Parler and Free Speech Debate?



.

^^Don't get me wrong, I despise Amazon and want them to throw the book at them, just not for kicking Parler off their servers.

The alternative would be to force Amazon to host Parler against their will, which is a whole other can of worms. If the Mercers are so hell-bent on creating Twitter's evil twin they can afford their own servers.

I'm not sure there's a good solution to the larger problem, other than destroying the current form of social media and breaking up companies like Amazon and Google. A good start would be to make targeted advertising and data harvesting illegal. If they want to advertise they can do it the old fashioned way, by matching ads to content, not to people.

No, I don't see that forcing Amazon to host Parler is acceptable.

You're 100% on the idea of making personally targeted advertising illegal. Content only. Plus subscription i.e., you can still sign up for ads you want).

Breaking up Amazon, Facebook and the rest is a great idea. How is that supposed to work with Google, the search engine -- objectively the best, whatever the recent de facto nudging and censorship via algorithm. A search engine still has to cover the whole web in one place -- a natural monopoly. And what of the online public square?

Unlike for health care, the public option is perhaps the right idea. Free socialized personal profile site, short-message site, and hosting. Again, first amendment protection would apply. But then, can the government just declare a crisis, say fuck the couts, up and shut sites down? Yup. Just like Amazon.

I have no fucking certain idea.

.

Splitting up Google would be easy. It's just a ton of different companies operating under the Alphabet label. Youtube becomes one company, Search another, hosting services another, etc.

They would of course just make deals with each other and continue to operate as one entity except on paper, which is why I'm a fan of banning their bread and butter: targeted ads and surveillance. Facebook in particular would be hard hit by that, and I'm surprisingly fine with that.

Amazon is a different beast as they make their money from screwing over the little guy and selling actual stuff, but breaking them up would at least take them down a notch or two. If they can't fund their store front and illegal business practices* with AWS they can't screw over as many people as they do now.


* They look at what's popular on Amazon and have full access to everyone's sales data. They use that to make competing, Amazon branded products which, shockingly (haha, not really), show up further up in their search results.

rant
Then of course there's their really fucking stupid habit of throwing all products of the same type in the same warehouse bin. I can sell *brand name item* on Amazon and ship 200 fakes to their warehouse. Those fakes get tossed in the same bin as all the legitimate items, so when someone orders one of my fakes there's a good chance they get the real thing, and some of the people who order from reputable sellers will get my shitty, and potentially dangerous, fakes.
Amazon doesn't give a fuck because it's cheaper for them to handle the occasional complaint than to do it properly.
/rant


Edit: 99% of Parler content has been scraped and archived, including deleted posts and raw images and video with all the metadata attached (including GPS coordinates), because of course they're shitty coders.

How about if we break up all effective oligopolies?

Personally, I am not against limiting every corporate (and individual) entity to gross revenues of say $10 billion per year.

Of course, that would have the "negative" consequences of promoting and ensuring competition.