[crazydoggers]

The difference with the phone companies is you’re talking one on one communication. Not a publishing platform which is what these social media services really are. You can always use text, signal, etc if you want to communicate with your group.

These are the same kinds of issues society dealt with, with the advent of radio and television, platforms that allowed small groups to reach out to very large groups of people with minimal effort.

Most countries have something like the FCC that regulates those platforms. Not only is it not permitted to incite violence in tv, even gross displays of real violence are censored, and even offensive speech. (For instance swearing).

Now we can have debates about the degree of that censorship, but the topics of free speech and first amendment rights have largely been settled.

If companies don’t self censor stuff that clearly 99% of society doesn’t like, then you’re going to see someone like the FCC or other government agencies step in. So what would you rather.

If someone like Parler or Gab wants to exists, they are free to at the moment, and they are also free to speak anything they want to whom ever they want. They just don’t get to force other people to support them in the process.

Coming from a family who’s relatives escaped from places which had true censorship, lack of any first amendment rights, the entitlement, and disconnect from reality in these arguments bothers me.

You do not have a protected right to a mass publication forum. That is not a first amendment right. You do have the right to establish such a platform if you wish to. But just like you had to buy you’re own printing press, you’ll have to buy your own internet infrastructure. And I and other groups of citizens (including companies made up of those citizens) also have a right not to listen to you and to throw your pamphlets in the trash.

And as a society, we have a right to limit free speech when it is very clearly only about hate and violence. You don’t get to call my house and tell me you’ll kill me for instance.

“ Under state criminal codes, which vary by state, it is an offense to knowingly utter or convey a threat to cause death or bodily harm to any person. It is also an offense to threaten to burn, destroy or damage property or threaten to kill, poison or injure an animal or bird that belongs to a person.”

[a_band]

> You can always use text, signal, etc if you want to communicate with your group.

Does Signal run on AWS? If I can shut you down at the cloud level then I'm not sure these options will be available in the future. Someone is going to coordinate a protest/riot on Signal, screenshots will leak, then what happens?

[crazydoggers]

Well Signal is free and open source. So feel free to boot up some servers on any other platform, or your own hosting and run it from there. Maybe signal the foundation needs to pay more or move platforms to support the app and make it easy to install, but again, why would or should AWS, Google, Apple be forced to host them? Don't those companies have a first amendment right to block speech they don't like?

It's like walking into the mall or public place, and saying, "You have to broadcast this message to everyone because 'freedom of speech'"".

In fact it's better to assume that private companies have such ability anywhere in the world. Signal fosters more access to defy censorship precisely because it realizes that. Making the software open source is how you allow people who need such tools to have them available.

And honestly... you've got the airwaves. It's called radio. Shortwave, can reach halfway around the world.

Again, the entitlement to these services astounds me. The internet didn't exist 40 years ago.... and now somehow the ability to assault people with misinformation, provide unfettered access for propaganda from state actors, permit the dissemination of hate speech is being called a right??

It makes no sense, and is completely devoid of historical perspective.

[a_band]

Like it or not private companies currently have a monopoly on the communication infrastructure of our planet. There is no "public option" for AWS. If they have a monopoly (which Apple and Google clearly have on the app store), then it comes with specific obligations to not discriminate and a requirement to provide services to everyone equally. That's the price you pay for banning competition from the market.

If Apple and Google allowed alternative app stores in their ecosystem, then there would be no problem with them kicking off any apps for any reason under the sun.

The argument is more nuanced for AWS as there are viable private competitors. However, it is stunning that they would cancel their contract with a customer by giving them only 24 hours notice. It's making me seriously consider why I would trust AWS as a partner.