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.
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.