For what it's worth, Amazon's filing in court that it's been warning Parler to get its act together for weeks:
"But far from getting cut off suddenly, Parler had months of warning, Amazon says. Amazon's filing included copies of emails it sent to Parler in mid-November (PDF, content warning for racial slurs) containing screenshots full of racist invective about Democrats, including former First Lady Michelle Obama, with a series of responses from other users to 'kill 'em all.'"
"Amazon provided 'more than 100 additional representative pieces of content' advocating violence on Parler over the following seven weeks, the company said. Another document in the filing (PDF, also with content warning for racial slurs and threats of violence) lays out dozens of examples of posts Amazon reported to Parler, beginning in mid-December. Those posts call for, among other things: killing a specific transgender person; actively wishing for a race war and the murder of Black and Jewish people; and killing several activists and politicians such as Stacey Abrams, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), and former President Barack Obama."
"Representatives from AWS spoke with Parler executive leadership on both January 8 and 9 about the platform's 'content moderation policies, processes, and tools,' Amazon said. In response, Parler allegedly offered steps that would rely on 'volunteer' moderation, and Parler CEO John Matze allegedly told AWS that 'Parler had a backlog of 26,000 reports of content that violated its community standards and remained on its service.'"
No doubt Parler was a rough place. But so was Twitter and Facebook for years. Parler deserves a chance to fix their problems. Otherwise what’s next? Do programmers who worked at Parler deserve jobs elsewhere? Who will hire them? When your employer is treated like the Nazi party because of what users post, and that spreads to every person related to the business, the guilt by association model just keeps spreading further. It solves nothing.
This is certainly an argument for owning your own infrastructure, as opposed to leasing it.
As for the programmers at Parler, their own incompetence - which resulted in a MASSIVE data leak last week - will be a larger factor in their own re-hiring than the fact that they worked for Parler.
Instead of taking Parler's car keys for a couple of weeks the corporate powers that be took the keys, steering wheel, tires, engine, transmission fluid, radiator etc... Chilling indeed. Have to find a more sensible way to proceed.
After Obama and destructiton of my health insurance by the ACA and the subsequent financial punishment thereof and considering all the civil rights the Obama bunch sought to destroy and still obviously going on is it any wonder there a lot of angry people? Rather than silencing the people one would think the correct path would be to eliminate the thorn poking us in the ass. The agenda of Google, Amazon etc is not in the country's best interest. Censorship is far worse than the social ills that will always exist. Been in court before with this and the lesson learned is that freedom of expression is the side the courts always leaned to. Will it change? They should not risk a lean to censorship. Check out some of Jesse Jackson's hate speech, BLM, antifa, Al Sharpton etc. They get a pass but no one else does? How does that work?
For what it's worth, Amazon's filing in court that it's been warning Parler to get its act together for weeks:
"But far from getting cut off suddenly, Parler had months of warning, Amazon says. Amazon's filing included copies of emails it sent to Parler in mid-November (PDF, content warning for racial slurs) containing screenshots full of racist invective about Democrats, including former First Lady Michelle Obama, with a series of responses from other users to 'kill 'em all.'"
"Amazon provided 'more than 100 additional representative pieces of content' advocating violence on Parler over the following seven weeks, the company said. Another document in the filing (PDF, also with content warning for racial slurs and threats of violence) lays out dozens of examples of posts Amazon reported to Parler, beginning in mid-December. Those posts call for, among other things: killing a specific transgender person; actively wishing for a race war and the murder of Black and Jewish people; and killing several activists and politicians such as Stacey Abrams, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), and former President Barack Obama."
"Representatives from AWS spoke with Parler executive leadership on both January 8 and 9 about the platform's 'content moderation policies, processes, and tools,' Amazon said. In response, Parler allegedly offered steps that would rely on 'volunteer' moderation, and Parler CEO John Matze allegedly told AWS that 'Parler had a backlog of 26,000 reports of content that violated its community standards and remained on its service.'"
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/01/filing-amazon-warned-parler-for-months-about-more-than-100-violent-threats/
No doubt Parler was a rough place. But so was Twitter and Facebook for years. Parler deserves a chance to fix their problems. Otherwise what’s next? Do programmers who worked at Parler deserve jobs elsewhere? Who will hire them? When your employer is treated like the Nazi party because of what users post, and that spreads to every person related to the business, the guilt by association model just keeps spreading further. It solves nothing.
This is certainly an argument for owning your own infrastructure, as opposed to leasing it.
As for the programmers at Parler, their own incompetence - which resulted in a MASSIVE data leak last week - will be a larger factor in their own re-hiring than the fact that they worked for Parler.
But they had weeks to amend their content and didn't - so what was Amazon supposed to do. Just let it go?
No. But I don’t think a permanent shutdown was warranted.
In any case Parler wasn't a tech innovation, technically it was just a ripoff of twitter, but it was a moral invitation - to be your worst self.
Instead of taking Parler's car keys for a couple of weeks the corporate powers that be took the keys, steering wheel, tires, engine, transmission fluid, radiator etc... Chilling indeed. Have to find a more sensible way to proceed.
After Obama and destructiton of my health insurance by the ACA and the subsequent financial punishment thereof and considering all the civil rights the Obama bunch sought to destroy and still obviously going on is it any wonder there a lot of angry people? Rather than silencing the people one would think the correct path would be to eliminate the thorn poking us in the ass. The agenda of Google, Amazon etc is not in the country's best interest. Censorship is far worse than the social ills that will always exist. Been in court before with this and the lesson learned is that freedom of expression is the side the courts always leaned to. Will it change? They should not risk a lean to censorship. Check out some of Jesse Jackson's hate speech, BLM, antifa, Al Sharpton etc. They get a pass but no one else does? How does that work?