Anyone is free to set up a computer in their basement, install a web server, open up port 80 to the world, and serve to the world whatever blog or forum they want. This is the beauty of the web. They can scale it up as traffic grows and deal with all those headaches if they want. I fully support the owners of Parler if they want to do this.
Twitter, FB, AWS, Google eventually came along and said “ok, you want to share your ideas or host a community, we can make that really easy with our tools and platforms!” You can post what you want without worrying about servers in your basement. But in exchange for that convenience you have to accept that they reserve the right to terminate the contract at any time. They should not be required to help you promote ideas that they deem harmful or toxic.
So Parler can go back to how we used to do things in the 90s...it’s a little harder but not that hard. No one is being censored. This is simply a few companies deciding to terminate a relationship with one of their clients.
> Anyone is free to set up a computer in their basement, install a web server, open up port 80 to the world, and serve to the world whatever blog or forum they want.
Only until their ISP decides to do the same thing Amazon did (or buckles under the DDoS attacks that will happen). Or their registrar or DNS provider, assuming you don't consider domains optional too.
everyone has a limit. for google, amazon, Twitter, Facebook, tik tok, Twitch and reddit. It is the point when there are screams for violence against lawmakers, the vice president, the president elect, the speaker of the house and the speaker of the senate. These are no empty threats as we saw last week and the companies which have the data are seeing plans for more violence being made on their platforms. They know more than we are and they are reacting like this. I think it will get worse in the next days and if there is a coup you are complicit and more important if your intentions in this post are honorable you will try to discuss the exact same thing we are discussing right now and will be shutdown and laughed at.
This is no morale debate anymore your choice is life or death. As a German I think about 1923 the attempted beer house coup in Munich and the lax response to Adolf Hitler and can only shake my heads at people like you.
At least I hope your sentiment comes from a high morale standpoint and not from misdirection as so many are in these threads.
If there we screams for violence then prosecute those people. This is blanket censorship and anti competitive monopoly capitalism. Gear up for the gulags, because that's where this leads.
So in your mind the choice is between gulags and concentration camps and you are saying you want the concentration camps, noted.
I want neither options and behold the screams of people like yourself this is unprecedented that we the people or companies have the power to surpress calls for violence and sedition from a government working on a coup to stop the will of their own people. I am glad that we try it with whatever will come of it because we know from history what will happen if we do not.
If you look at the media outlets left and right they decided to pull trump of the air for much less and we don't see even fox, oan or other right wing media giving him a platform. 90% of the censorship calls are one-sided as well I see no one screaming about parler or thedonald.win banning progressive politicians or users on sight. your bias shows and it's abhorrent.
Most of the western democracies (all?)except the US don't have that unregulated concept of free speech.
I don't see and hear anything about gulags in GB, France or Germany. They just don't have mobs trying to overtrhow the gouvernemnt.
I'm sorry to disappoint you. We had something like this in Germany around August [0]. We call them "querdenker" and they are basically a group of neonazis, esoteric people, covid is a hoax people and right wingers.
> Anyone is free to set up a computer in their basement, install a web server, open up port 80 to the world, and serve to the world whatever blog or forum they want.
The internet as it exists for many people all over the world does not always include control over ports, or even a static IP address. Even if you do have a static IP you'll still need to go through a company to register a domain.
And as far as I know there's nothing stopping an ISP from refusing service, which could be coordinated just like this app store removal.
I mean I guess they could grow their own food too, but at what point does denying services to people with legal, but differing political preferences become wrong?
If Amazon said they wouldn't tolerate anyone who supported BLM because of the numerous riots and deaths caused by the movement would we this be okay? It's worth remembering that 50 years ago Amazon would probably morally object to hosting people who were pro-LGBT too.
The point of free speech is to protect those with unpopular opinions. This is because the default human response has always been to do the opposite. For years the science and arts were suppressed by people who just thought they were doing the right thing. As a civilization we have learnt from this mistake. Companies with global monopoly should not be empowered or encouraged to repeat it.
You're talking about services that are "common carriers".
They have special legal obligations to, within reason, facilitate every legal transaction that comes their way. The scenarios you describe therefore cannot happen with them.
If you want internet platforms to have that same level of "anything goes", then you're arguing for them to be classified as common carriers.
I figured I wasn't the first one to think of the idea :)
I'm not sure how I feel about it though. A "commons" physical space has has an firm upper limit on how many people it can reach.
I don't think anyone is entitled to the massive amplification of their words that a large social media platform can provide without recourse to either being moderated or curated the way other broadcast media is done. A person could not perform some analog to "shouting fire in a crowded theatre" on those traditional media forms, and I don't see how doing it on the internet should change that.
The problem as always is where do you draw the line? Some free speech advocates seem to say it's too difficult so we shouldn't try. That one reasonable step could be the justification for an unreasonable one. I think that's a complete cop out. I think you do the reasonable thing, and then fight against the unreasonable thing. Not give up because it's not easy. It's a hard thing and we need to constantly as a whole and in individual circumstances assess our judgements, but not back away from making them.
This is not the gotcha you think it is. Multiple airlines, for example, have banned passengers from their flights for refusing to wear masks. They are well within their rights to do so.
That's a pretty silly false equivalence. Supporting Bernie Sanders poses no harm to anyone. Refusing to wear a mask on a plane does. So does planning a terrorist attack.
Why not? Half of leftist twitter has their own ASN, is peering with each other, and running kubernetes clusters in racks in their living room. (often because mainstream platforms wouldn't host their content either).
That setup works just fine, often to serve significantly higher amounts of traffic than you could afford at any regular hoster, too.
Look at the anarchist network setup at chaos camps, serving 100Gbps+ in the middle of rural nowhere, from server racks set up in chemical toilets, powered by geenerators and solar panels.
Not only does Parler have the option to set up their own infra like the old-school days of the web, they even have the option of promoting their speech via modern mobile only apps.
It’s not impossible to have the entirety of their community communicate solely via Signal, WhatsApp or iMessage. Or any theoretically equivalent end-to-end encrypted messaging app where the “message group” is the entirety of the current Parler community.
Apple, FB or anyone else, have no way to separate those users from others.
Of course, one could argue that Apple & Google could institute new policies to prevent the spread of misinformation on apps. But nobody can argue that it is a definitively more difficult problem to solve than on a user-content based, server-driven social network such as Twitter.
WhatsApp has implemented feature such as limited forwarding to combat misinformation.
But still they haven’t (and technically cannot) prevent Parler users from expressing their views.
In other words, I don’t see any instance of Parler users losing their right to free speech anywhere. Sure, they don’t enjoy the luxury of _convenience_ driven speech. But depending on how you define it, none of us have universally convenient means to express our speech.
Twitter, FB, AWS, Google eventually came along and said “ok, you want to share your ideas or host a community, we can make that really easy with our tools and platforms!” You can post what you want without worrying about servers in your basement. But in exchange for that convenience you have to accept that they reserve the right to terminate the contract at any time. They should not be required to help you promote ideas that they deem harmful or toxic.
So Parler can go back to how we used to do things in the 90s...it’s a little harder but not that hard. No one is being censored. This is simply a few companies deciding to terminate a relationship with one of their clients.