this, from their "technical difficulties" notice, should have been enough for him to be fired on its own. requiring some users to provide government identification, building such weak security that anyone can read and archive private messages, and not stripping out damaging meta-data from media posts are three ways to not provide privacy.

if this was truly their mission, then their platform was already doomed, and a full housecleaning of most of the leadership should probably be done, not just the CEO.

I don't care what side of a political spectrum you come from, or whether you support the site's mission or what it became, these failures should be unacceptable in any company.

I tried to delete my account but the option is not available or may be hidden behind the forced verification requirement.

In some minority of cases, though, they would. Abusive ex sending you messages over discord? Yeah, those might be evidence especially when both parties are saying different things. This is the most common example I can think of, but I'm sure there are others. Heck, even if someone wanted to reminisce about days gone by... they should have the right to do so in conversations they were involved in.

They are actually deleted, unlike many other platforms. If not, the problem described here would not arise in the first place: https://blog.discord.com/how-discord-stores-billions-of-mess...

But I thought Discord, somewhat controversially, did actually let one person delete messages from all parties. Maybe they eventually caved because it enabled abuses/harassers to deprive their victims of evidence.

Although administrators can take away your right to even see the existence of a channel, which means that you no longer can delete your messages in that channel, since you have to see the messages to be able to delete them. For the record: if you have the permissions, you can delete anyone's messages in a channel.

Similar issues can arise in direct messages, for example if you closed the DM, and say, you left all mutual servers, and you unfriended your friend (without blocking), and the person changed his or her name so you are no longer able to add him or her back. When you add someone, that person will appear in "Pending" friends after having added, so you can click on "Message" to open the DM. Without that, you cannot open the DM, which again means that you cannot see the messages, thus you cannot delete them. I put "without blocking" in parentheses, because if you block someone, they will appear in "Blocked" friends, and it keeps track of changes in their name or even ID (that they are able to change with Discord Nitro), and you can open a DM easily from there. To open up the DM, you right click on the name, then click on "Message" which you can only do if 1) the person is in the same server you are, 2) the person is your friend, 3) the person is in "Pending" friends, or 4) if the person is in "Blocked" friends.

Alternatively, if you lose access to your account through losing your password, getting your account disabled, or removed by you or Discord. In this case, too, you lose the ability to delete your messages.

To bulk delete your messages, you can use https://github.com/victornpb/deleteDiscordMessages. If you have sent 100k messages, then it could take hours for your messages to get deleted due to rate-limiting. This script does nothing more than what you can already do manually; delete the messages you can see.

---

TL;DR: You can delete (and edit) your own messages on Discord as long as you can see them (have access to them), and you can delete other people's messages from channels if you have the right permissions.

If I send you an email, same thing, if it survives for such a long time. Does Google/any ISP also own it?

If I send you a SMS, same thing, I bet it won't survive. Does the phone company also own it?

If I write you on a social network, do you and I own the message or does the social network own it? There are ToS that we might not have read.

While the receiver of a letter on paper certainly owns the letter she doesn't own its contents. The copyright of the letter remains with the author.

So you can frame the letter and hang it on your wall you violate the authors copyright if you publish it without authorization.

What you can do is sell the physical object. That belongs to you.

You can also burn it or destroy it - which is an interesting edge case.

This really comes down to different kinds of ownership. The whole point of copyright is that creative/cultural/intellectual property rights are a thing, analogous to tangible property but with a different set of legal and commercial rights and obligations.

Electronic media depend on context. ISP and telcos are usually considered common carriers so they don't own the copyright of emails or SMSs.

Social media networks either claim all copyright in full (bad news for you...) or have a specific license clause in the T&Cs which gives them reproduction rights.

Sometimes these are for specific limited purposes, and sometimes they're a blanket sign-away of all exploitation rights. (Bad news for you again.)

Also, how does it work if a whistleblower gives a journalist letters that they received from someone else? Is the journalist not allowed to publish them in an article?

To the down-voter: could you please elaborate with what you got the problem so we could potentially discuss it?

i.e. John Does said, "Hello world" -> [Removed] said, "Hello world"

If I reveal I'm a criminal is it any different? What If it's 10 years later and I've served my sentence? Does it matter if the crime is morally wrong or even illegal where you live?

What it it's personal but not criminal, say I've come out as gay or a republican or a democrat or a communist.

I think we would be foolish to rely on greater privacy than is provided by terms and conditions and logically we will only acquire more favorable terms by requiring them in law. You gave a good example When you discussed being unable to delete data pertaining to your account.

I think on a one to one message your recipient has a right to a record of what you actually said I don't think allowing one side to edit it after the fact facilitates honest conversations nor does it much protect the person who reveals sensitive information to do so. You can already attest to what they revealed or keep a screenshot.

I think on a many to many forum like this thread that people ought to be able to control what new users see but people who already received the initial version have a right to the information imparted to them.

Basically I view a message as belonging to everyone who received it and the service ought to retain it as long as one person whom it belongs to wants to keep it.

I can see good reason to selectively remove content that is illegal say child or revenge porn but I feel like further restrictions ought to fall on the ethical reasoning of the receiver not technology to answer the complex moral implications.

If you disabled the account yourself, then you should be able to recover it and then press the delete button yourself. If it was disabled for a TOS violation or for legal reasons then they might have a gdpr exemption to deleting the data[0] (NAL).

As for messages, those aren’t deleted - while this might be legal (anonymization is seen as compliant with the right to be forgotten) they really should make it an option, otherwise people end up using scripts which do it for them[1].

0: https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data-protectio...

1: https://github.com/victornpb/deleteDiscordMessages

I use https://github.com/victornpb/deleteDiscordMessages, yeah. :)

Discord probably doesn’t do that though

https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/44717/is-gravatar-a...

Somebody else ran a similar attack on a different dataset using a GPU and recovered around 45%.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/12/crypt...

The authors' moral right alone should allow any content authored by them to be un-published. Ever heard of a paper being pulled?

You example of bullying is top notch but what about doxing concerns? Plenty of people delete their "content" without being bullies.

e.g. purchase history, legal agreements, etc.

Deletion is another matter though.

Don’t worry though, if you request to have it deleted I’m sure they’ll remove the link to the S3 url from their database. :/

It is not logical to both present something as FACT and then also admit it is speculation.

If I flip a coin 1000 times it will probably land on heads at least once.

Thousands of huge corporations have continuously been caught up in data dumps, hacks, insider schemes, etc. Especially with data that has no liability. This case is statistically unlikely to be any different.

Now if I had made this up in a world where experian, Adobe, capital one, etc didn’t happen, then I could see where you’re coming from. But I’m not, this is the world we live in and it’s rightfully why people get upset when companies suck in yet more PII.

The former is a fairly defensible position. PCI standards for this sort of data collection should be a government matter as they are the ones requiring this information to begin with. The latter isn't based on reality and not worth arguing about.

Source? I’m able to book hotels online without sending a picture of my ID.

Anyone from DO reading this: I hope you shred those photos.

It was always the same script: first they purposefully confuse it with account deactivation and they confirm your removal, but formulated in a way in which it could also mean deactivated, then, after you answer to the ticket that what you meant is actual deletion, not deactivation, they tell you that they forwarded your request to someone who will delete your account and that they will write you once it's done. No change in approach changed their script in any way.

> Ich habe deine Anfrage an jemanden aus meinem Team weitergeleitet, der dich dabei besser unterstützen kann. Der entsprechende Mitarbeiter wird sich in Kürze bei dir melden. Falls du in der Zwischenzeit weitere Fragen oder Bedenken hast, kannst du gerne auf diese E-Mail antworten

... then I waited six weeks and back to square one, since I could always still login to get the deactivated message. The offer to answer on the same ticket again is apparently untrue. ..at least they never answered again on the same ticket.

What helped was not contacting support but instead pasting a comically formal erasure request (Article 17 of the GDPR) from the internet to dpo@airbn..

As far as I am able to validate, this did it.

1. As far as I was able to see, this:

> If you want to permanently close and delete your account, you can do this yourself through Manage your data.

is not true. There was only a button to deactivate the account. I think that they show different pages depending on the user country and just didn't add account deletion for German accounts.

2. Once an account is deactivated, you need to contact them through /help/contact-us/ to reactivate it, but since you are not logged in, it immediately forwards you to /help/contact-us/logged-out, which tells you to either login or just browse their fluffy web help labyrinth. Google told me to use terms@airbnb.com, which was how I ended up reaching support. Support was a dead-end though. They claim to do it, but they apparently do not actually delete the account.

3. Even if it would've been possible, they claim to want to "verify your identity for security purposes" prior to acting on your deletion request (which I could not do anyway, as the function was absent).

Hence, the GDPR method seems superior, given that it's actually available and they don't force you through an "identity verification", which is probably just there as additional friction to deter users from account deletion.

Exactly. They weren't really interested in true privacy or free speech, they were just using those keywords to attract customers.

I think you're taking an overly negative tone with someone who appears to agree with you.

GGP: It's a bad choice, but it saved a bunch of money.

GP: I don't think it even saved much money, percentage wise, did it?

And then your reply takes a very negative tone, as if the GP is suggesting that some amount of cost savings would have justified it. The GP is not suggesting that some amount of cost savings justifies what was done.

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200627/23551144803/as-pr...

And didn't exactly perform adequate moderation based on the rules they did have:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26022229

I had thought that what would kill them would be that those echo chambers rely on an enemy to be opposed to. Without it, they would just get bored and wander off. That's what they like about public forums such as Facebook and Twitter. They're not perfect echo chambers. They're opportunities to have their echoes amplified, then go off to fight the good fight against their dastardly foes.

Beating up on the left-wing trolls should be fun. Sure, some of the left-wing troll masquerade as right-wing trolls to throw people off, but really, it's hard to tell the difference. Poe's Law is more and more prescient.

If anything it was less free speech than Twitter

Perhaps they aimed too high too fast (dunno, never even went there), but I just can't bring myself to make beginner-shaming a core pillar of my criticism.

Small or "beginner" web payment companies are required to think more responsibly about user data; the state of Parler in January 2021 was ridiculous and users who were effectively doxxed should be outraged.

Teach and guide them to not make things open to the public. Mentor the next gen engineers on security. For god sakes check a jwt claim...

There's beginner shaming and then there's going above and beyond with intrusive PII collection.

Clowns.

[0] As others pointed out in sibling comments, these people are not "beginners" by any stretch of the imagination.

They're clowns, and deserve to be laughed at as such.

The other security faux pas was that they did not scrub GPS metadata from images or videos at all.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parler#Content_scraping

I'm interested in knowing how you think a real "free speech" platform can actually work, however. We have message boards that do this and they are just toxic cesspools. The idea of an online "public square" that isn't that sounds impossible. How many public squares are reaching millions of people instantly?

Parler was more than happy to moderate speech, even political speech, as is their right as the platform creator. Their breathless claims about being free speech absolutists is absolute nonsense.

I'd like to know the answer to this, too. I wonder if the reason why they turn into toxic cesspools is precisely because the only people who use free speech platforms are the people who were kicked off the others.

If you accept that this is plausible, then is it feasible that the more reasonable folks that just want to talk about politics in a less divisive manner (or maybe not even politics at all!) might help bring down the temperatures if everyone was swimming in the same pool instead of just a few extreme viewpoints forced to move into the same swamp? (NIMBY!)

This would also be in keeping with that classically liberal axiom, "The remedy is more speech, not enforced silence." (Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, the Democratic justice who is credited with creating the "Right to Privacy" in 1890: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Brandeis)

You don't have to wonder, we've seen this time and time again with virtually every open community. Without tireless moderation, the swamp grows.

In other words, the majority of people who use free speech platforms have already answered your question: they've shown themselves unable to co-exist with (a much larger number of) reasonable folks and were kicked out.

Suppose that the dominant platforms (e.g. Facebook) are not free speech platforms. They boot off a hundred thousand people. 10% of them actually deserved it and are militant jackasses who ruin everything.

Now someone else creates a "free speech" platform. Everybody is allowed in. Well, 80% of the initial users are going to be a subset of the ones who got kicked off of the incumbent platform, and 10% of those are jackasses, so your platform is now 8% jackasses. That's a huge percentage and it's going to immediately turn into a dumpster fire because the jackasses will drive out ordinary people and become an even larger percentage. There are plenty of instances of this happening, e.g. Voat.

But suppose you go the other way. Somehow get a large number of ordinary users. Now the jackasses are only 0.5% of the users. Combine this with something like a voting system so that nothing is ever actually removed, but spam and fascism end up at the bottom of the feed where nobody sees them by accident.

That has the potential to work. The key is to somehow get enough users to dilute the jackasses before they take over, e.g. because the incumbents overreached and a large number of non-jackasses are moving in protest.

Moderation didn't come before toxicity it came in response to it. Therefore, moderation doesn't cause / focus toxicity.

If you want to address this, you need to look at education.

It turns out that people don't, as a general rule, actually enjoy using totally unmoderated fora; they tend to quickly fill with spam and awful stuff.

It worked great for multiple decades until "social media" applied algorithms that promoted controversy (i.e. anger-inducing hyperbole and conspiracy theories) to increase "engagement" and sell more ads.

That you can find an ASCII swastika or goatse on Slashdot which is instantly downvoted to -1 (but not actually removed from the site) was never a real problem. That Facebook put QAnon at the top of your mom's feed was a major problem.

But then we get calls for censorship as a response to problem created by bad moderation.

Notice that there is a difference between voting (where the community determines prioritization in a decentralized way but nothing is rendered unavailable) and censorship (where some fallible central authority is deciding what people are not allowed to know).

Turns out outraging people increases engagement so the “jackasses” get amplified.

Arguably FaceBook is too.

I’d love to see a decentralized free speech platform. I’m no blockchain evangelist, but it would seem like such technology could be used to build a real online “public square” as you say.

[0] https://scuttlebutt.nz

Exactly. Alt-left speech was not welcome on parler - only alt-right speech.

I will, however, point out, that much of the alt-right is terrified of the antifa boogieman... And that Parler, the platform of free speech was quite happy to ban anything that smelled of antifa... As well as much that could, be described as moderate leftism.

Its tolerance for speech only extends to a very narrow slice of the political spectrum.

What gets blocked on Parler is more appropriately called "not supportive of white nationalism." That way you are sure to capture the entire space of content, whether Alt-right or not, instead of narrowing the universe to Alt-right and things the alt-right is encultured to fear but don't appear in reality.

Patterns of negative conversation defined by fewer quality reply posts get negative points and vice versa for positive or patterns to be encouraged.

As things evolve and how people respond changes these patterns can change.

With free speech, as defined now, low quality arguments hit the same bar as high quality ones.

Yes we should strive to emphasise high quality arguments (even though I fear this is a near impossible task programmatically) but this is not what free speech means.

Tldr: according to free speech the dummies and assholes deserve to be heard.

That we're even having such a high-quality discussion now really speaks volumes to the seemingly effortless way in which the HN team has developed into a great place to have such a conversation or debate. To be honest, I do not think that HN is always fair to everyone, but it does seem like the moderators do try to be.

With that said: Twitter and FB have wildly missed the mark.

Technological discussions mostly stay high quality but any politics(-adjacent) topic turns into an obvious struggle of moderation and quality.

The same goes for Twitter but the balance of topics is heavily skewed towards the latter.

That being said, I do agree with GP on this point:

> To be honest, I do not think that HN is always fair to everyone, but it does seem like the moderators do try to be

Let me give this a shot. There are two types of content that need to be removed: (1) spammy content that readers themselves don't want to see, and (2) illegal content that society doesn't want anybody to see. I think these two need to be addressed separately.

Illegal content includes copyright infringement, violations of NDAs, libel, slander, perverting the course of justice (violations of court orders), incitements to violence, consipracy to commit a crime, exposing troop movements, and in general anything that directly causes damages which could be assessed and recovered in a court of law. Racism, sexism, homophobia, "hate speech", advocacy of violence, falsehoods, trickery, promoting very dangerous ideas, lying about (or being incorrect about) vaccines, lying (or being incorrect) about who won an election, offensive speech, and jokes of all kinds are, at least in America, all forms of protected speech.

Illegal content must be taken down when ordered by a court to do so. AFAIK the platform isn't responsible to take anything down unless ordered by a court to do so, but I'm probably just ignorant -- PLEASE dont take legal advice from some random armchair pontificator on the internet like myself. Section 230(c)(1) protects the platform as they are not deemed to be the speaker.

Most people are terrible judges of whether something is illegal or not. For example, many congresspeople think Trump's Jan 6 speech was illegal (it wasn't) because it incited violence (it didn't). It didn't even advocate for violence. The idea that it was illegal is so far beyond Brandenberg to be laughable if it wasn't so serious... but back to the point... Attempts to proactively take down illegal content will invariably take down some legal content, probably lots of legal content, which is why a true "ideal" free speech platform would not attempt to do this... one must have humility and recognize one's near utter inability to determine what is and what is not illegal to any reasonable degree of accuracy during times of political strife like we find ourselves in today. The popular opinion right now is that all of us should enact justice upon each other according to our own personal interpretation of justice... which is just nuts when you think about it. Let's leave law enforcement up to the law enforcement professionals.

The first issue, the spammy content, would then be handled the same way we handle email spam. Plug into the spam filtering service of your choice, subscribe to rulesets, or write your own. I don't know of any platform that lets you plug in your own moderation, and so that's where I think they've all gone wrong - they either get flooded with spam or antisemites and become nearly useless to nearly everybody, or else some moderation team thinks it is their role to filter spam on behalf of the community and the community gets pissy that they filtered the wrong things. These two extremes are both wrong. Users can filter their own content if given the right tools. BTW, Section 230(d) requires providers notify their customers that parental control protections are commercially available... it puts the onus on the users to solve this for themselves... even way back when that law was written.

I'm going to add a third issue, flooding. That has a content neutral solution: throttling.

Of course you are correct, but that doesn't make me factually wrong. You are talking about publishing illegal content. But (c)(1) "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider."

And I missed DMCA takedowns.

With this statement you are implying one of two things:

* You are very unhappy with AWS for de-platforming them

* You think AWS should not have been allowed to do so

If it's the first one, well, you are free to treat that however you like. Stop using AWS yourself, especially if you now fear AWS will do this to you. Don't do business with other companies that use AWS -- you can even block all AWS IPs at your firewall. Tell everyone how bad they are, and encourage others to boycott them too. If AWS continues to de-platform customers that don't seem to deserve it, this will get even easier over time.

If it's the second one though, that raises all kinds of tricky issues. If you run anything that allows user content, and a user posts something that hurts you, are you now obligated to host it (leaving aside illegal content and the tricky jurisdiction issues that go with that)? What if other major customers or users start leaving because you're hosting said content -- are you just supposed to let your site/business effectively die? Are you also forbidden from raising the price to that harmful user to $1-trillion-per-month (since that effectively is a way to "de-platform" them), and if so, what is the maximum price you're allowed to charge and who figures that out?

Asking a customer to stick to the rules they agreed to and eventually ending the business relationship when the customer chooses not to is hardly a 'partisan act'. Parler could have just done what AWS asked (even temporarily, to keep themselves online while looking for alternatives). They didn't.

"The Islamic State of Iraq and ash-Sham (ISIS) continues to use social media as an essential element of its campaign to motivate support. On Twitter, ISIS’ unique ability to leverage unaffiliated sympathizers that simply retweet propaganda has been identified as a primary mechanism in their success in motivating both recruitment and “lone wolf” attacks." [2]

Apparently US authorities were happy to want Twitter to keep those accounts alive for some time as they could use them to track activity - the point remains it's wrong to the point of naive to believe that these decisions are not political.

Facebook was enabling genocidal activity [3].

It's incredibly hypocritical to look at the historical activities of ISIS on Twitter, Facebook and all of these platforms, and then to hear about the 'political violence' caused by Parler.

I don't like Parler, the hypocrisy is staggering.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_of_social_media_by_the_Isl...

[2] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebo...

The difference is, there was actual moderation. Parler, a tiny (2 orders of magnitude tinier than Twitter) appears to have had no moderation infrastructure at all.

Even the data in your first reference seems to suggest that Twitter alone has probably moderated more accounts than Parler has actually had.

Broken record: I'm still surprised so many people here have so little exposure to the hosting business to believe that there's actually an inviolate right to due process in keeping your stuff hosted somewhere. Hosting providers have to kick users off all the time. It is a basic fact of life in hosting: people abuse stuff.

Parler wasn't running a phishing scam, spamming, or DDoS'ing people, but that's not my point; my point is: if you're a hosting provider, your contracts basically have to give you the right to boot people at your discretion. The idea that anyone thought AWS's might not? Baffling.

The following is an excerpt from https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/29095511/34/parler-llc-... the order denying the injunction.

"AWS has submitted to the Court multiple representative examples, reflecting content posted on Parler during this period, that AWS claims violated the terms of the AUP and the parties’ Agreement. ... Parler has not denied that these posts are abusive or that they violate the Acceptable Use Policy. "

You obviously did not see the material that the company allowed to be posted on their services in contravention to their hosting provider's terms of services.

Always abide by your host's AUP. Otherwise, you can get yeeted.

AWS AUP: "You may not use.. or instruct others to use, the Services.. for any.. offensive use"

"Offensive"? That word is so vague as to be meaningless.

This turns into a dangerously simple attack. Just post something you know will offend someone. Et viola: you just killed a company.

It's a lot cheaper and easier (and less likely to involve swat teams) than hiring some sketchy DDoS outfit.

AWS arguments:

https://twitter.com/KYWeise/status/1349200096345296897?s=20

> Parler itself has admitted it has a backlog of 26,000 reports of content that violates its (minimal) community standards that it had not yet reviewed

https://twitter.com/KYWeise/status/1349203942614335488?s=20

> When I said Amazon cited many vile and violent examples of posts that it flagged for Parler, I meant it. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ErlVjN7U0AEr1gt?format=jpg&name=... https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ErlVjPBVEAEs9sg?format=jpg&name=...

https://twitter.com/KYWeise/status/1349202898459115520?s=20

> Such a requirement also poses a risk to Amazon itself, with posts calling for others to "burn down Amazon delivery trucks" until they "reverse course."

Amazon is still working with Parler to export their data off of AWS.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/johnpaczkowski/amazon-p...

> We will ensure that all of your data is preserved for you to migrate to your own servers, and will work with you as best as we can to help your migration

> not without giving the other party ample time to make other arrangements

Going entirely offline like that can easily destroy a web business. Or at a minimum seriously harm them.

Not to say I care much for Parler's technical nor administrative approach to providing free speech.

Parler had ample time. They ignored warnings, they did not address their TOS violations. Then their contract was terminated, and AWS is helping them migrate after the fact. Parler displayed an ignorance of the law and how web hosting works.

Web companies that repeatedly violate the TOS of their hosts deserve to be at the mercy of their failover plans. That responsibility is borne by the web company, not the host.

Their position is usually to not rely on non free software

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_carrier

I'm old enough that racking my own boxes and hosting everything myself is both natural and easy (and cheaper and faster).

But working with plenty of young developers, most don't have any exposure or interest in setting up anything other than AWS services tied together.

So like it or not (I don't) we're rushing towards a world where AWS (maaybe GCP, mostly not) is the only way to build something.

It's good to consider the implications of this.

By volume, GoDaddy is actually a bigger host than AWS by a factor of 2.

The HN crowd vastly overestimates how big AWS is compared to less sexy options.

0: https://www.zdnet.com/article/godaddy-q3-revenue-beats-expec....

1: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/02/aws-earnings-q4-2020.html#Bo....

In a very real way, a founder today has more options for hosting than they do for catered lunch.

Except that's not how it works in the slightest. You have moderation in place to work to prevent that. You are doing your due diligence. You are making an honest effort to solve this problem. Mistakes will happen. Nothing is perfect, but you are making an honest attempt, and it's reasonably effective.

Parler was not doing anything close to that.

Your comment operates under the belief that these things are binary. Simply post one thing someone can find offensive, and "I win!"

But most people, most successful companies, are smarter than that and operate in reality.

>This turns into a dangerously simple attack. Just post something you know will offend someone. Et viola: you just killed a company.

What's the probability at any given time that someone on HN is offended? YCombinator seems to use Amazon's Route 53 and would therefore be at risk.

  Domain Name: YCOMBINATOR.COM
  Registry Domain ID: 147225527_DOMAIN_COM-VRSN
  Registrar WHOIS Server: whois.gandi.net
  Registrar URL: http://www.gandi.net
  Updated Date: 2020-02-15T20:11:05Z
  Creation Date: 2005-03-20T23:51:07Z
  Registry Expiry Date: 2021-03-20T22:51:07Z
  Registrar: Gandi SAS
  Registrar IANA ID: 81
  Registrar Abuse Contact Email: abuse@support.gandi.net
  Registrar Abuse Contact Phone: +33.170377661
  Domain Status: clientTransferProhibited https://icann.org/epp#clientTransferProhibited
  Name Server: NS-1411.AWSDNS-48.ORG
  Name Server: NS-1914.AWSDNS-47.CO.UK
  Name Server: NS-225.AWSDNS-28.COM
  Name Server: NS-556.AWSDNS-05.NET

The way you're wording this sounds very much like you haven't actually seen the kind of stuff that was going on there. It's not simply a matter of people being offended.

In this case, they pointed to it weeks prior and it wasn't removed.

That is not what happened however. That is quite manipulative framing spread by Parler.

What happened was that Amazon itself identified those few dozen posts and asked Parler to remove them. Parler did not done that and claimed it is difficult for them. Amazon is not Parlers competitor. Amazon gave Parler plenty of time to remove those posts. The issue was that Parler was unwilling to do so, because they whole thing was to be safe place of exactly that sort of comments.

Twitter does not have too good moderation, but they are not refusing to take down inciting posts on principle. They did regularly took down accounts and tweets in the past. There is difference between not doing it perfectly and refusing to even try.

That is exactly what is in Amazons court response. You either did not read it or are lying.

https://i.redd.it/om90nwadqca61.png is a Parler post with a racial slur and 25k upvotes. Twitter has its issues but an equivalent comment isn't going to survive two days.

The court documents from their case against Amazon are available at https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/29095511/parler-llc-v-a.... Amazon's declarations contain other examples of content that wouldn't survive on Twitter.

> Regardless, this is besides the point: all a competitor has to do is post some garbage and point to it, and boom, you're dead. That's not ok.

According to https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/29095511/13/parler-llc-... it took several months of moderation problems before AWS dropped Parler as a client. If Parler had done more active moderation and tried harder to keep Amazon happy they'd still be hosted on AWS.

The truth had come out, hadn't it? Even before the 2020 election, people had been mocking the network for arbitrary post removal and the requirement to show official IDs for at least some features.

Services that chose not to host Parler were exercising their freedom of association; they were _communicating_ that they did not wish to support Parler.

You have free speech, but zero freedom from consequence.

That's about the most Orwellian meme that is making the rounds and needs to be examined critically. Freedom to do a thing implies protection from consequence, or you're not free.

Also there were articles on HN about how the Capitol riots were organized on Facebook.

This is a wild take on freedom. Do you seriously believe that free speech means that you should be able to say anything and be protected from any and all consequences?

It's so vague, these one-liners, that we're talking past one another. Surely you don't think you should be able to doxx or punch someone in the face that has extremist views?

How could you possibly believe this in good faith? Consequences can also be, for example, people expressing their distaste in your speech and choosing to boycott your products if you're a business.

You said protection from consequences, not protection from criminal violence and harassment. If you meant protection from criminal violence and harassment, you should have said protection from criminal violence and harassment.

If signal gets deplatformed get your pitchforks. Till then I'm not worried. Also regarding the slippery slope, let it slide. If this is how we start regulating cloud services as utilities then so be it.

His investors and board hired him to win, not to pick a principled hill to die on. Martyrs are cheap and nobody making investments can afford cheap things. The irony is Parler positioned itself as less radical than Gab, and it was that very position of bargaining with its platforms is what killed it. How can 4chan, Gab, and the even darker parts of the internet manage to persist online with hardly any money, but someone with Mercer level backing can't keep a site online? The lesson is an example of things we already know, which is that anyone who needs platform permission do to a disruptive startup is already dead.

We absolutely need alternative platforms, and our societies need tools that can survive popular histrionics. Getting owned by some sanctimonious prick at Amazon is not pro level play.

The only thing I am happy about is how fast the cycle is operating these days ie how quickly mindlessly ambitious self important people who get propped up through pandering to the right clubhouse get discarded.

Thats a good thing.

>look for entrepreneurs who actually know what they are doing

Um, with enough capital they usually make money either way and guess which kind are easiest to come by.

This is a lie, it’s just a question of whether or not he believes it or if he’s just saying what he needs to say to land another role. Parler moderated all kinds of people off the platform for a variety of reasons, including political speech. Anything they said to the contrary was no more than PR puffery, not reality.

Seems like banning communities that led directly to an insurrection in congress should be one of those tools, no? I mean, that part was a bit more than just "histrionics" by "sanctimonious pricks".

I know you won't buy this because of the environment that we find ourselves in, but I assure you that those of us on the left care JUST AS MUCH about civil liberties and free speech as you do. We do. I swear it.

We just don't think that forum moderation is really that much an infringement on them (I mean, you're posting this on a heavily moderated forum right now). And we're less willing to forgive or excuse the spillovers from speech into action that we've seen.

No one who posted on Parler should be denied a voice on other forums. They just need to do so in places where they can't get away with calling for real violence.

If you're going to apply a standard, at least apply it fairly.

Step 1: Hire huge moderation team.

Step 2: Write draconian terms of service that incorporated every possible offensive thing that any vendor might object to.

Step 3: Build an app that explodes with all the users that are delighted with the moderation.

Step 4: Profit!

That's not how Facebook and Twitter ("the free speech wing of the free speech party") were launched, but maybe those wouldn't ever have been able to launch today anyway.

Any parler type thing is only ever going to get the worst of the worst of possible users. The folks who get kicked off Facebook and Twitter aren't the people you want to build a business on

They could have if they went with a provider located in another more conservative country. Or long-shot self hosted.

Not supporting Parler however, it deserves it's rightful place in the embers of eternal hell for negligently failing to protect & secure sensitive user data.

Twitter's moderation has become partisan enough that it might be desirable to build a business on people they have kicked off. Notably Trump - while he was supremely unpopular on the left, opinion polling suggests he is leaving a more popular legacy than, eg, George W Bush. Maybe even George H.W. Bush. That is a pretty decent foundation for a business.

That's also an unsettled assertion. Especially when talking about kicking off Trump, since they had been letting him break the rules for years. Removing his exemption is arguably a reduction in partisan bias.

Siding with a political majority is a safe strategy; but that statement is pretty much indefensible. Even if you believe they had grounds for the ban based on a history, their actual reasoning is different from your justification.

Nonpartisan moderation would involve, at some level, quotes or instances where Trump said something objectionable.

[0] https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/suspensio...

No, just violent rhetoric associated with a real world violent movement. I don't understand why that keeps not registering in these discussions.

I mean, even accepting your frame that we leftists have infested Big Tech and want nothing but to censor our political enemies: they've had years and years to do it, and didn't. And only when it got to the point where congress was actually attacked that a site had to be shut down. And it was just one site, and its users just moved on to Gab and such.

I mean really, if conservatives are so terribly censored... how is it you guys are so loud about it?

Tech companies make these grand unctuous gestures because it distracts from how awful they know they already are. Everybody knows. The Parler CEO failed to create an alternative platform because he thought he could bargain with people who are not only not-above mendacity and deception, but it is their stock in trade. He's just a coach who lost in the play-offs due to unforced errors.

Look into the history of Greek city states. A mob of civilians storming the chambers of government is quite literally how tyrants have installed themselves.

Some of those tyrants had to try multiple times, before the last attempt succeeded. They generally follow up by killing their political rivals, because people who come to power through violence rarely turn around and adopt a policy of pacifism.

It's hard not to see this through that lens; terrify the legislative body enough, and they'll break the constitution for you (in Caesar's case, make you sole consul, sidelining the other properly elected consul, give you a highly unusual command in Gaul, then make you effective permeant dictator; in this case, overturn the election, for starters).

If you want to be hyper-pedantic, it's maybe not a coup; it wasn't the military. Nor was Caesar's first power grab, though (and arguably not the others either; Caesar's supporters were likely a more immediate personal threat to the senators than his army).

It really did make the US government seem far more fragile than I even expected.

Killing elected officials going through the steps of a peaceful transition of power would have been "no real threat to democracy"?

> It's not like the police and military are going to take commands from some nutjob cosplayer just because they're wielding Nancy Pelosi's lectern.

Just because the USA would not instantaneously have become a dictatorship doesn't mean that there was no threat to democracy. Do you think Joe Biden would be president right now had they succeeded in storming the building (and had none of the officials been evacuated)?

Neither January 6th, nor in Athens would a mob rush the chambers of government to install God-King Billy Rando, who nobody has heard of. Coups only work when the person benefiting from them already has a large amount of civilian and political, and sometimes, but not always, military support behind him - but not large enough to win power through legitimate means.

Suppose that the mob compelled congress to affirm Trump as the winner. Do you really think the 'police' (Which police force? Would they have jurisdiction? Who'd be giving them this order? Nancy Pelosi does not give police forces orders...) would have headed to Pennsylvania avenue to arrest Trump? What if the part of the military that is supposed to put down civilian coups (Which part is that, by the way?) decided to sit this one out?

At best, events would escalate into an actual, successful coup.

The military (at least here in the US) swears allegiance to the Constitution, not the president. And they were very clear about broadcasting that the military was not going to interfere in domestic politics.