> On the other hand, do we really want a handful of unelected billionaires deciding what is acceptable speech - whether or not we agree with them? We talk about net neutrality, but shouldn't we apply the same standard to hosts like AWS?
I think it's fine to be concerned about the principle while in agreement on this use. Both things can be true.
And FWIW, that's the state in which I find myself. The president used Twitter to promote lies about the election that were consumed by his followers who then used social media to plan and execute violence in the US capitol. When that same cycle threatened to repeat, these companies stepped in. Good for them, what was their other choice?
But appropriate action in this case does not mean that the process and standards used are OK in the arbitrary case and completely agree that lack of legislative standards is the problem. The tech companies had not good choices here because as a society we've not yet set any reasonable rules.
As per Wikipedia: "A majority of developed democracies have laws that restrict hate speech, including Australia, Denmark, France, Germany, India, South Africa, Sweden, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom."
The Unites States is not in that list. Hence it is more vulnerable to problems associated with allowing hate speech (i.e. incitement of violence by foreign-state actors, etc.).
Companies that operate on the global markets tend to operate with the standards that are acceptable globally. In particular: "On 31 May 2016, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Twitter, jointly agreed to a European Union code of conduct obligating them to review "[the] majority of valid notifications for removal of illegal hate speech" posted on their services within 24 hours."
So in that particular case, influence of these companies might be bringing United States closer to best practices adopted in the majority of developed democracies.
> So in that particular case, influence of these companies might be bringing United States closer to best practices adopted in the majority of developed democracies.
Best practices for maintaining a democracy or best practices for maintaining social order? There's a difference. You might argue that restricting hate speech is actually a step away from democracy towards more government control.
You can look at the following parameters that are critical for the health of democracies: electoral process and pluralism, civil liberties, the functioning of government, political participation, and political culture.
And consider how moderation of hate speech affects these parameters. Evaluating these on an example of presidential debates of 2020 might be a good option. As there is a contrast between the first debate, that included no moderation and a second debate, that included some.
From an optics point of view, if it looked like they were handling all users the same way, there'd be so much less of a problem here. But right now, it is like selective law enforcement -- action will be taken if we don't like you, much more than whether you are deemed to be complying with the terms of service.
What they could've done is consistently enforced their rules all the way along, to people of all political persuasions.
Is there evidence that there are other AWS customers with easily discoverable content that incites violence, which AWS is not working to have removed due to their terms of service?
People rioting under the guise of "antifa" killed innocent people in Portland. They even bombed a court house. There's videos of "antifa" who tried to molotov police but accidentally self-immolated instead. It's a meme that the media will call these "peaceful protests".
As someone who has no dog in the race, and hates violence -- is this "fake news"?? Do these rabid maga idiots actually have a point?
If these protests were organized using FB or Twitter then why aren't they also removed from the app stores?
FB profited from radicalizing people using "engagement metrics" and machine learning at a massive scale just to sell ads. Now they want to wash their hands clean?
These billionaires weren't democratically elected and they shouldn't be shaping our democracy.
If there was a social network whose primary objective was to promote these actions, then sure.
As it happens, these actions are not coordinated en masse, are neither promoted nor supported by even the vast majority of people who are supposedly aligned ideologically with is perpetrators, and are not organized in spaces mostly devoted to that purpose.
Is this responsive to my comment? I am asking whether there are examples of posts of the kind that Amazon asked Parler to take down (clear incitement to violence / glorification of terrorism), which another service hosted on AWS has refused to take down when made aware of them? I don't know whether there are or aren't, which is why I'm asking. Your comment does not answer this question.
> You're continuing to demonstrate that if I answer your questions it has no bearing on your ideology.
Again, how am I demonstrating that? I honestly can't see anyway that you have any idea what I think, from my comments in this thread, without just completely making up a projection out of whole cloth.
> Now you want to know if Twitter has an active account with AWS. I could answer that. But does it matter?
It does seem to matter, when the question is "should AWS stop hosting Twitter because of the way in which they moderate their content?". AWS can't do that if Twitter is not hosted on AWS... So I fail to see how it doesn't matter.
To answer what I think your original question was, filling in assumptions for my (still unanswered...) questions: if Twitter is hosted on AWS, and if AWS notifies them of content they are hosting with AWS that violates the AWS terms, and Twitter refuses to remove that content, then yes, I believe AWS is within their rights to suspend Twitter's account.
I was actually in Seattle while similar protests occured, and seeing things myself, I can say that the media did mis-portray things greatly. 99% of the protestors were completely peaceful and tens of thousands of people rallied to protest day over day all peacefully. I was surprised the media coverage didn't really cover those much, it chose to focus on like the single instance of a car lit on fire at 3am and those very minor instances, sometimes the media photoshopped images too, where they'd like superimpose a person holding a weapon in front of the photo of the car on fire and things like that. And I mean all media, left-wing, right-wing, small media, big media, like they all did this, which I was very surprised about.
I felt pretty safe for the most part, when people weren't protesting I'd still go and have coffee and order croissant at my favourite places in the area that was "occupied".
Things got scary when "anti-protester" started showing up, and suddenly everyone felt like people would show up with guns so protesters felt they needed guns too, and then there was this weird tension of like why we all have guns?
I was really surprised personally at the intensity of the police response, especially in the beginning, and to me it felt like the police really escalated tensions early on which is what led to protesters starting to bring fireworks and umbrellas to protect themselves from police "croud control". Like if a single person in the croud threw a single bottle that was enough for the police to just start pepper spraying and tear gazing everyone. I always wondered why the police doesn't just go after that person that threw a bottle or broke a window, I'm not sure what justified all this collateral damage from them. There were kids and moms and even handicapped people at a lot of those protests.
Most striking is the way the police organises around protesters, even though the protests are peaceful, they flank the croud, and really position themselves like the police and protesters are about to have a Braveheart style face off. I don't understand why the police doesn't spread themselves through the croud and instead help keep the protest peaceful by deterring the few people who are there to cause raucous. They should focus on the people disrupting the protests, help protect others from them, and arrest those.
I was just really surprised by that, because if there was a parade, the police would do what I'm describing, but for a protest it seems they treat the protesters like a huge threat and that makes the whole thing really tense and makes people feel like the police is actually against them. It didn't help that the protesters were there to protest police brutality and they were welcomed by more police brutality and confrontation.
What I really want people to focus on here is this fact, I'm from Montreal, where we take Hockey seriously, and when the team Wins or Loses at the final, police cars are lit on fire, windows are smashed, while people celebrate the victory to the street or morn the loss of our hockey team!
Now in Seattle, you had 60000!! Yes I said Sixty Thousand!!! PEOPLE marching an entire day completely peacefully without a single broken window or fire: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/thousands-march-in... when the population of the whole city is 600000. That means 1 in 10 people participated in this protest, and there were not even minor raucous! That's the most peaceful assembly of such a large number of people I've ever seen in my life.
In Montreal, you have 1k people in the street it doesn't matter why and there's more raucous then that.
And these protests, they didn't just happen once, day over day thousands of people over and over again, and everytime only a handful of incidents, mostly in the late evening or at night. Just do the math, 60k people, if 100 of them broke windows, threw rocks and lit some things on fire that would be 0.16% of the protestors. It be enough for the media to have footage ad-nauseam and publish 100 article about the "riots" and for police to bring out the tear gas. But it also means that 99.84% of the protestors were peaceful. Honestly, if it was for me, I think I'd call these the most peaceful protest I've ever seen, I think they should be given an award for how peaceful these were given the amount of people and the circumstances of how tense the topic was and how they were received by the authorities.
Disclosure: I'm just a bystander here, I didn't participate in the protests myself, I only observed and watched from the sidelines, and I knew people who did and heard from them. So take my info for what it is.
> What I really want people to focus on here is this fact, I'm from Montreal, where we take Hockey seriously, and when the team Wins or Loses at the final, police cars are lit on fire, windows are smashed, while people celebrate the victory to the street or morn the loss of our hockey team!
Happens in almost every city I've ever lived in. I've seen far more violence at a Los Angeles Lakers or San Francisco Giants riots after they win a championship than at my local BLM protests.
I find the phrase “incite violence” to be a deceptive term to use.
A threat of violence is a very defined term. Both legally and in common understanding.
“Incites violence” is vague and takes the responsibility away from the one conducting violence, and places it on somebody else who may or may not have been promoting violence. It’s usage is not defined legally or in common usage.
“Barney is the worst dinosaur” could be “inciting violence” if somebody attacked the purple children’s mascot.
Should we have to mute ourselves because crazy people might use our words as justification for their madness?
Should others censor my opinions because in their opinion, a third party might use my words for justification for their madness?
The usage I’m seeing does not fit the below defined criteria:
The speech is “directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action,” AND
The speech is “likely to incite or produce such action.”
I personally believe the posts Amazon asked to have taken down meet the Brandenburg test, but note that Amazon is not beholden to apply the legal test, though I do believe it is a good starting point. Another reason to take things down is "glorification of terrorism", which I believe also applies to some of the posts.
It's one thing if I say the election was stolen. I should not be censored for saying that it was. My voice alone will not sway anything. The problem is that so much power is concentrated with the president that it ONLY takes his voice to throw an entire country into chaos. That's too much power with one person.
So what am I saying? That I should have freedoms the president should not?
Well, the USA could impeach and remove that person, or they could reduce the power of his office. But so far the people and their elected representatives have opted not to do either of those things.
This same power has been used, on a less dramatic scale over the past year and for a long time before now, to attack police reform activists and disrupt organizing of the local activist communities that exist to oppose this shit on the ground.
It's not really a situation of "this may be socially chilling", it's been happening, and now it's just the first time they contravened the president and made the news cycle.
I don't really see any other decision they could have made this past week. But if social media and capital in general would stop kneecapping every political option but ineffective liberalism and dogwhistle fascism, maybe the large numbers of people who are angry and feel helpless would currently have a pressure valve in a healthier direction.
Three or four massive companies with incentives to suppress the slightest disruption to profit, that hold unprecedented surveillance power, and exercise detailed control over individual and mass communication, that make apparently ideological decisions about who is allowed to exist online, are not compatible with a healthy society or any path that could lead us out of this situation.
"Opposing this shit on the ground" is why we're in this nightmare in the first place. Imagine if there had been counterprotestors "opposing this shit on the ground" at the Capitol insurrection: we'd probably be pretty fucking close to a civil war right now instead of near universal condemnation of the extremist forces.
If you have anything to do with "opposing this shit on the ground", please fucking stop. You are accomplishing less than nothing.
>Brandolini's law, also known as the bullshit asymmetry principle, is an internet adage which emphasizes the difficulty of debunking bullshit: "The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude larger than to produce it."
> If they are lies then why can't they be refuted instead of suppressed?
It's harder to refute lies in the marketplace of ideas if everyone with a megaphone is obligated to echo them. Perhaps this wouldn't be true if people were perfectly rational, but if people were perfectly rational they wouldn't be believing and spreading lies in the first place.
This was my attitude too until about 3 years ago. But we're dealing with a group of people who genuinely believe that Trump is saving the world from a cabal of cannibalistic pedophiles, and if Biden becomes president they'll all be carted off to FEMA camps. How do you reason with someone like that?
This is a false equivalence. The clearest reason is that zero of these cases resulted in sedition. This argument is distracting, it is classic whataboutism. In no way is it the case that moderating the app stores and shutting down access to Parler or the President's Tweets equivalent to condoning Clinton's or Jackson-Lee's or Sander's actions. I recommend that you look at this particular case and draw your conclusions about it without complaining about the failure to respond the same way to very different situations from other people years prior.
I'd like to see the evidence of how violent actions by pro-DNC parties like BLM/antifa which occurred after these words are any less tied to them than the actions that happened after Trump's words. For empirical data's sake.
Other than the President giving an in person speech before this exact group of people on the same morning as the events took place in which he directed them to march toward the Capitol building?
During: President begins speech at approximately noon. Some protestors already amassed at Capitol. During speech, crowd begins moving away from the speech location, gather at the Capitol building, and breach outer perimeter “bike fence”.
After: The President’s speech ends at approximately 1:10pm. Crowd is still outside the Capitol doors. Congress begins certifying the vote. Protestors clash with police, both sides spraying chemical irritants.
Protesters continue to gather in numbers, surrounding the Capitol building until breaching the exterior doors at approximately 2:10pm.
Other than the planting of pipe bombs at the Capitol/RNC/DNC (which I haven’t seen reporting on the timing), all significant violence took place shortly after the President’s speech ended.
The constitution prohibits the government from banning political speech unless it will, e.g. incite imminent violence. Keyword being imminent. Merely supporting violence in general and non-specific terms is not illegal and cannot be made illegal under the constitution, so the government cannot decide to ban most of the types of speech that the tech companies have chosen to ban (including Trump's recent tweets that got him banned).
If you think it is good that the recent bans took place then you have no choice but to delegate decision making authority to the industry, because the government is not constitutionally permitted to demand that tech companies make those decisions.
I believe the distinction between the two (though note: I am very willing to change this belief based on learning details I don't currently know) is that Facebook tries to remove such content (though it may not perfectly succeed) whereas Parler actively refused to do so when AWS made them aware and asked them to remove it.
And the US government should bring a case against them. I don't think you'll find me inconsistent in that thought, I also argued an ISP yesterday that blocked FB is fully within its rights to do so.
Personally I think we need anti-trust action against a lot of larger tech companies and second that they have now opened the door on further regulation regarding content moderation. I think getting rid of Section 230 entirely would be a mistake but I won't be surprised to see it amended in some form.
Never mind plain old lobbying, any legislator who supports a crackdown on Facebook could be de-platformed. These tech leviathans have captured the regulators in a way that has never been seen before, and now they are flaunting grotesque anti-competitive bullying in all of our faces. Depending on the government to fix this mess is not going to go well.
This is one reason why amazon pulled the plug and the violent posts were "rapidly growing". This kind of customer is probably a huge headache to deal with, and complaints were being sent/forwarded from amazon and "some" were acted on.
Amazon said:
"It's clear that Parler does not have an effective process to comply with the AWS terms of service. It also seems that Parler is still trying to determine its position on content moderation. You remove some violent content when contacted by us or others, but not always with urgency. Your CEO recently stated publicly that he doesn’t "feel responsible for any of this, and neither should the platform." This morning, you shared that you have a plan to more proactively moderate violent content, but plan to do so manually with volunteers. It’s our view that this nascent plan to use volunteers to promptly identify and remove dangerous content will not work in light of the rapidly growing number of violent posts."
I guess it’s theoretically possible to set up an arm of law enforcement whose sole job would be to monitor all social media, along with a judicial division that could stand at the ready to issue court orders for comment takedowns. Maybe.
>>I guess it’s theoretically possible to set up an arm of law enforcement whose sole job would be to monitor all social media, along with a judicial division that could stand at the ready to issue court orders for comment takedowns
I think it's fine to be concerned about the principle while in agreement on this use. Both things can be true.
And FWIW, that's the state in which I find myself. The president used Twitter to promote lies about the election that were consumed by his followers who then used social media to plan and execute violence in the US capitol. When that same cycle threatened to repeat, these companies stepped in. Good for them, what was their other choice?
But appropriate action in this case does not mean that the process and standards used are OK in the arbitrary case and completely agree that lack of legislative standards is the problem. The tech companies had not good choices here because as a society we've not yet set any reasonable rules.