Look, they were kicked off for their content. I hesitate to call their content "viewpoints" but it's become roughly synonymous with speech so I guess it kinda fits. Regardless, I'm happy they did it. I think there is room for "exception that proves the rule" type behavior. When the bridge too far is literal Nazis I'm okay with considering AWS to still be politically neutral. No ToS violation (which was flimsy at best) needed.
I didn't realize that death threats were a viewpoint.[1]
> People on Parler used the social network to stoke fear, spread hate, and allegedly 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 Jan. 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.
Parler was used to coordinate the Jan 6 attacks, and when they were caught with their pants down they promised some half baked scheme to have unpaid volunteers do moderation. It was demonstrably a joke and they were caught failing to moderate more attack planning that was happening out in the open on their app. I think Parler leadership got off easy on this, they frankly should've been in jail on January 7th for being accomplices and not merely getting kicked off AWS.
The death threats angle is a complete red herring, considering that other social media absolutely does leave out such posts for even longer than parler did (and very rarely is held accountable for whatever their users are posting, even when it takes literal months to moderate).
But regarding your last paragraph. Sure let's agree that everything you said was right. So what? It still shows that AWS does cut off consumers based on politics. I'm not aware of any legal action against Parler so I don't think they were accused of anything illegal. The fact that you agree with the political reasoning behind the decision does not make it any less political.
Especially since the only time that they ever intervened for something like this was when it happened in the US. It didn't happen during the Arab Spring, or the 2014 Ukrainian revolution, or any other time where people used an AWS hosted platform to coordinate a coup.
> The death threats angle is a complete red herring, considering that other social media absolutely does leave out such posts for even longer than parler did
Other big social media companies generally own their own infra, so they they don't need to get into existential crises when their landlords go looking into their activities.
> But regarding your last paragraph. Sure let's agree that everything you said was right. So what? It still shows that AWS does cut off consumers based on politics.
Not sure how you're able contort this argument together. Parler was involved in crimes. AWS didn't need to prove that beyond a reasonable doubt like the justice system did, they merely had to have a good faith belief crimes were happening on Parler and Parler wasn't making good faith efforts to mitigate them. They didn't merely fail to moderate, they basically told Amazon to kick rocks when they were provided with evidence of crimes on their platform.
It's honestly kind of insulting to cry about political repression when it was just garden variety crime the whole time.
How was it involved in crimes? Again, can you be more specific?
I agree with you about other social media platforms owning their own infra, by the way. But I'm not sure if that supports your point? If the only difference is that they own their own platforms, meaning they can do whatever, doesn't that show that AWS is actually unreliable for products like these? Which is what OP was arguing?
Also, it's weird to say that I was crying about political repression. My point was that your comment itself was arguing that they were still removed for political reasons. Which meant that you agree with the person you replied to, it's just that you think that it was morally correct which is besides the point.
And if Parler did commit a crime, or crimes, surely that would be public knowledge? Jan 6 lead to a rather intense series of prosecutions, so you'd think Parler would also face criminal charges. Unless you meant that it was used for criminal stuff, which is true. But that's a completely different standard, and one that AWS only applied to Parler (for obvious reasons). If you are saying that enabling criminal activities is a crime, then that would apply to other social media too (regardless of if they own their infra or no). Yet again, Facebook or YouTube has never been charged for anything like that.
It's totally fine since AWS was within its rights to ban them, but it's weird to argue that it had nothing to do with the politics of the situation. Again, AWS does not care about coups outside the US, which are just as illegal.
1) If you run the numbers on how many man-hours and cost it takes to moderate a popular platform, what you end up with is a situation where small players (like Social Media Startups) can simply never afford to get into the game, because of the moderation burdeon.
2) The other problem regarding censorship is that it has to be done by humans, and humans are not objective and benevolent. All humans will apply their own political ideologies towards their censorship decisions. This is true because your sense of morality is involved. That's what happened at Old Twitter. They were all Silicon Valley leftist moderators, and so they deemed conservative speech "immoral" and kicked people off for things even as mundane as misgendering or mere "impoliteness" to some "protected class". It got WAY out of hand. Thank God Musk came along and freed everyone.
