Terms & conditions = Tyranny!!!1 (Update)
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Americans for Liberty, which is regularly featured on Fox, does its part to remind everyone that the average libertarian is a jackass who thinks the free market should be allowed to do whatever it wants. Until it does something they don’t like.
From the organization’s blog:
(Quick warning – the blog has a resident cartoonist. Your eyes will hate you if you look at his output. So be careful if you poke around in there.)
The “censorship” in this case is two different decisions by Apple, Google and Amazon Web Services gave social media platform Parler an ultimatum: comply with our terms of service, or we drop you.
The company didn’t meet any of the deadlines and is out of service [AWS will shut down Parler’s access at 11:59 p.m., PT]. But it is unlikely to be gone for long, as this Balloon Juice post explains.
The short answer of what this means for Parler is that they’ll probably be down for a few days until they find a new host, and there will never be a Parler app on a mobile device. In other words, their status on the Internet — meaning how they will be treated by other tech companies and potential investors — has been demoted from something like Twitter or Facebook to a porn site.
Parler’s CEO framed this as an attack on competition and ALG has taken up that argument.
The collusion of Amazon, Apple and Google to shut down the social media sharing site Parler – Facebook and Twitter’s competition – is a continuation of their attack on the free expression of ideas.
It doesn’t matter if the idea is “Let’s kill lots of people.” Businesses must give the person who has the idea free reign to share their ideas of who they want to kill and how they’re going to kill them and maybe coordinate with like minded murder-thugs.
Why this doesn’t also mean newspapers must print every letter to the editor they receive or that phone and email providers can’t yank your service if you use it to harass people are the sort of questions that the people who are screaming about Parler or the Great Troll Purge of 2021 are very carefully ignoring. No time! Too busy carefully cherry picking when businesses should be free from restraint and when they should not.
Silicon Valley has moved from being a model of American innovation to being arbitrary arbiters of thought.
SV should stick to exploiting workers and driving up the property values in and around San Francisco.
Their actions to shut down competing ideas must be met with immediate state and federal anti-trust action, which the Supreme Court should hear as soon as they are filed.
I dunno, it has been 44 gazillion years since I studied anti-trust law and I’m OK with that. But it looks like a pretty big claim to say five different competitors put aside their differences and ganged up to squash one social media platform by insisting that Parler stick to the terms of the contracts it had with the various companies. Are contracts no longer sacred to libertarians? Of course they are. In the same way scripture is sacred to right wing evangelists. Great for insisting that other people do what they want, but fuck if they’re going to pay attention to it.
As an aside, I know there’s a very irritating debate over whether it is good and right for social media platforms to first limit and then ban the Inciter-in-Chief to stop him from doing more inciting. My quick thought is this: The only people bothered by two platform’s extremely overdue enforcement of terms of service seem to be unaware that platforms suspend and shut accounts all of the time, for violations far milder than fomenting Coupapalooza I and II. So to hell with them. But after the ones claiming DOPUS’ 1st Am. rights have been violated. Those people suck.
Update: A rallying cry from Divorce D’Souza.
El. Oh. El. Apparently he isn’t aware the site goes dark tonight. And he was still on Twitter four hours post-flounce, complaining about Big Tech. (Which is bad now!)
