Amazon pulled support for Parler, which was hosted on Amazon Web Services, and the free-speech social network is now offline. This comes only days after Apple and Google both announced they were kicking the Parler app off of their platforms.
Free speech is not free and tech conglomerates now control the narrative. This comes as a lesson to never host a site in North America, and to certainly never hand control of your site to one of the big tech giants.
We wait to see what the Parler team does next, whether transition their site to an offshore host or simply admit defeat.
Let's be honest. If he thought free speech would be safe on Amazon, after seeing what it did to its sales platforms, he's a fucking moron.
Of course Parler will not admit defeat.
They probably have 20 or 30 of the smartest guys in the country who have been working literally nonstop since AWS booted them fixing the problem.
Speaking as a developer, the problem they're having is probably not finding another host (you can get hosted on countless Russian, Ukranian, etc hosts with nothign but a credit card) it's fixing their dev ops to work with something other than AWS.
They will be working 24/7 until they fix it, and it will be fixed.
The bottleneck is probably identity verification and proxies. Failures in IDV have dogged them from the start.
They're not admitting to it, but if the IDV system goes down, their software just allows people to bypass verification - which obviously must be fixed.
I'm about as left as they come, but I don't support this shit, and I've seen an unfortunate number of my fellow Progressives who support this censorship. I guess they don't get that they'll come for us next. (Although to be fair a lot of the censorship supporters are fake leftists, people who voted for Hillary and Biden)
Anyone who's a REAL Progressive doesn't support censorship.
Do I think Twitter and Amazon has the RIGHT to censor? They're private companies so they have the right to shut down anyone for any reason. But that doesn't make it right.
I've never been a subscriber to the notion that the platform should be responsible for the speech on it. So, like if someone is planning something illegal over the phone you don't shut the phone company down. You go after the people who actually did it.
As far as the President goes I don't have a problem with his account being shut down per se, I have a problem with it being done by Silicon Valley billionaires who have no accountability to anyone instead of a court of law, after the President has been afforded a fair trial.
There are limits to free speech, I think every sane person agrees to that. The "yelling fire in a crowded theatre" example and all that, but if someone does that they have to answer to the law.
The real left doesn't support corporations. The Democrats and the left you're referring to are neoliberals.
Spoiler alert: He's an FBI intern. Pay it no mind.
A federal court already found Trump's social media accounts to be part of the 'public square' (remember how Twitter wouldn't allow Trump to block people based on this finding?)
That sets a clear precedent that social media censorship of Trump or any other public official is unconstitutional.
Source?