The line from most folks since Amazon Web Services “de-platformed” the troubled Parler social media app has been concerns that it was arbitrary and an example of Big Tech censorship. Thanks to court filings, Amazon is now painting a very different picture, one that goes back to months of warning Parler about the content they were allowing:
Amazon hit back at Parler on Tuesday after the alternative social media site filed a lawsuit against the corporate giant this week following its suspension from Amazon Web Services.
Parler on Wednesday entered its third day of being offline after Amazon Web Services cut off the upstart platform from its cloud hosting service following last week’s deadly riot at the U.S. Capitol.
“This case is not about suppressing speech or stifling viewpoints. It is not about a conspiracy to restrain trade,” Amazon Web Services said in a response to Parler’s lawsuit. “Instead, this case is about Parler’s demonstrated unwillingness and inability to remove from the servers of Amazon Web Services (‘AWS’) content that threatens the public safety, such as by inciting and planning the rape, torture, and assassination of named public officials and private citizens.”
Amazon Web Services said it told Parler repeatedly that content on the site violated the two companies’ agreement. Suspension was a “last resort” to block access to violent content, AWS said, “including plans for violence to disrupt the impending Presidential transition.”
“There is no legal basis in AWS’s customer agreements or otherwise to compel AWS to host content of this nature,” the response reads.
And what was that content? The court filing lists examples taken from Parler that Amazon had been warning needed addressed dating all the way back to November. Here is some of them, and be warned, even with certain words blocked there is graphic and vile stuff following so content warning:
Once again, from earlier in the week, Em touched on the First Amendment argument:
Finally, let’s address the issue of social media deplatforming. Trump lost his Twitter account, and now many others of a conservative stripe have been suspended. Then, Apple and Google Play took Parler, the MAGA-dominant Twitter competitor, out of their app stores because of a lack of moderation allowing explicit threats of violence on the platform. Personally, I disagree with their actions on principle. Silencing these voices does not change their opinions or stop their actions, but it does make them harder to trace. I suppose there is an argument for preventing spreading of dangerous thoughts and suggestions to others vulnerable to influence, but that is a precedent we should be very careful about setting. In any event, Google, Apple, and Twitter are not our government, no matter how much Jack Dorsey might want to be an overlord. It is not First Amendment censorship.
Parler deserves their day in court, and Big Tech has many issues that need to be debated and thought out. The internet is one of the greatest tools for freedom we have ever had, and we had better treat it as such both in practice and in regulation of law. But the more that comes out, the harder and harder it is to see how Parler did their own due diligence in the design, intention, and operation of their product. Now they will be paying a price for it, and that is not the fault of Big Tech, censorship, or political and/or business opponents: it’s Parler’s.
I fully expect Parler to start data mining Twitter looking for instances of threats that Twitter ignored.Report
I suspect Parler does not have the resources for a protracted legal fight hereReport
Depends on how much money their backers want to throw at this.Report
Trust me, it will all be money thrown down a rathole.
The ToS agreements are clear in that the determination of a violation is made by Amazon in accordance with the language in its agreement.
That Twitter chose to ignore certain instances that Amazon did not is legally irrelevant, especially if the violations are clear under the agreement Parler signed. This all falls on the interpretation of the language in the agreement and that language is crystal clear.
Honestly, this is almost worse than the election fraud lawsuit and that’s saying a lot. I’m no lawyer but I deal with legal issues all the time and the idea that a counterparty to a mega-company’s canned legal language thinks it has an out here is insane, especially when you consider that Amazon would have gotten sign off from both inside and outside counsel on this one.Report
How much money was just burned up trying to overturn the election.
These folks aren’t being rational, I expect them to burn money.Report
I actually believe that the people who run Parler are grifters, and are perfectly rational.
That’s why Parler appears to have been built on the super-cheap side, leading to all the publicized weak security.
They were trying to capitalize on a short-term dissatisfaction with Twitter, and they did not expect it to last a long time. Just make hay while the sun shines.
So the suit looks like PR, not an actual legal challenge. “We are fighting this!” is the pose.Report
You mean the whole, hey, look, we changed an admin password, made tons of new admin accounts, and basically sucked every post, video, etc. off the site for off-site archive?Report
IIRC, they didn’t even have to do that.
Parler used a ID system for posts that simply incremented by 1 for each new post. And then used a deletion flag, rather than deleting posts (it turns posts to “do not show” rather than “delete”). And then didn’t bother stripping picture and video metadata.
So to archive all of Parler simply required writing a web-scraper that bypassed Parler’s own UI, in order to request every post by ID (starting at 0) until you stopped getting post.
Which…people did. Wasn’t hard. Anyone who has ever written a web crawler could write the script to do it.
You would get everything, included deleted posts, because the “don’t show this post it’s deleted” flag was interpreted by the Parler interface to not show.
Of course on top of that, I have no doubt AWS has archival copies of Parler going back months and months.
If the FBI wants everything Parler had related to the Capitol Hill riots, they can subpoena Parler and AWS, and they’ll get it all. Every post, photo, and video — complete with GPS coordinates and other metadata.Report
LMFAO!Report
That’s sure how the President operates . . .Report
To what end? IIRC, Twitter operates its own hardware and system software platform. An option that was available to Parler, aside from the fact that it’s a hell of a lot of work and up-front money compared to leasing virtual resources from AWS or Azure.Report
Honestly, I have no idea, it’s just seems like the next logical move, to try and show AWS is being inconsistent.
I mean, the initial lawsuit had accusations of anti-trust, and was not filed correctly, so it seems we are looking at legal arguments maybe slightly better than Rudy and Sydney, but not much?Report
To the extent this is a contract dispute inconsistency of enforcement of the TOS isn’t relevant to the case.Report
The other option is that Parler sincerely thinks all this stuff should be hosted freely because its owners also believe in the content of the message. The far-right Mercer family is one of the money groups behind Parler.Report
The current constitutional consensus on Free Speech was based on mid-20th century broadcast and other media technology. Now most people have more broadcast power in their pocket than Walter Cronkite could dream of. I’m not sure if the constitutional consensus can survive this unless people are willing to deal with a lot of potential disorder and really messy politics as a side effect.Report
They’re going to get potential disorder and really messy politics no matter what.
The question is whether The Powers That Be will be able to deftly say “those are the old rules, we now operate under *NEW* rules” or if they’ll pull something half as clumsy as the distinctions made between punching up vs. punching down.Report
The threats and violence Twitter won’t police! This response was complete hypocrisy because Twitter is partnering with AWS on some projects.
https://t.co/dsusG1cpE9?amp=1Report