[liquid_bluing]

Is it still the ethically right thing to do even if it results in more violence? In my opinion, as a practical matter, near absolute freedom speech is good policy because speech is a buffer between wanting to get your way and doing violence to get your way. An increasingly large swath of American society believes that not only is our democracy corrupt, but they can't say anything about it. What's left? It's not at all obvious to me that taking away someone's ability to effect change through their speech will reduce the likelihood of people coming to harm through violent conflict.

Now, free speech _can_ also be used to spread lies and incite violence, and maybe banning Trump before he had a chance to spread unsubstantiated claims about election fraud would have prevented this recent chaos, but it seems to me that doing it afterwards will increase the chances of violent conflict, at least in the near term. Moreover, the possibility that he might have eventually conceded or placated his supporters is now nil. So, as a consequentialist, I'm dubious of the notion that banning him can be justified on ethical grounds.

[0x426577617265]

Amazon included some screenshots of content from Parler that they said violated their ToS. I'd say look at the screenshots they provided then try to justify hosting that content:

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/johnpaczkowski/amazon-p...

[benmmurphy]

One of the images includes the hashtags #executethemfortreason #deathtotraitors #fuckmikepence. However, you can search #executetrump on twitter right now and find tweets of a similar nature advocating executing trump. Would these tweets on twitter justify a similar reaction from AWS? I realise the example tweet from parler is probably the least bad in the set of offending tweets but it was included nonetheless.

This whole banning of Parler looks like a bad faith exercise where those with different political opinions are held to stricter standards.

[liquid_bluing]

I'd say, keep your friends close and your enemies closer. Maybe there is an argument for banning the opposition, but "They say evil stuff" doesn't seem like a good one to me. In adherence with Godwin's law, I'll point out that very few people actually read Mein Kampf. If more people had, it might not have been such a surprise when Hitler started doing exactly what he said he was going to do. If you want to succeed in suppressing the opposition, anything short of gulags and secret police, (which do work, but obviously have no place in a democracy), is just going to enrage them. History has shown that the best way to change minds is to expose the baddies, not to force them underground to conspire outside the public eye. I could be wrong, but to me it just seems like bad strategy.

[5nlight]

you are right. So, either a stupid mistake was made, or..