[themacguffinman]

But...that's what moderation is. Promoting some topics and pushing down others. Deleting certain groups which repeatedly break policies (which, by the way, are not limited to posts that call for violence). Deciding what is "orthodox" and what is not. This is common, even on this site. When a HN mod deletes a flagged thread because it doesn't follow the rules, are we all plunged into 1984 + Fahrenheit 451? When a comment is deleted and someone is baned even though they didn't literally call for violence, have they seized control of our thoughts?

The way I see it, Amazon (or Facebook etc) didn't censor Parler in the unilateral and totalitarian way you allude to. At some level, every company has to have the freedom to choose who they do business with, every person has to have the freedom to choose who they associate with. Amazon just said "no, I won't sell you AWS anymore". They didn't threaten Parler, Amazon does not have the power or authority to threaten Parler; They didn't and can't prevent Parler from choosing another provider. What's happening here is that Parler knows that no one else will voluntarily do business with them either.

Almost everyone in the industry has turned their back to Parler on their own. That cannot be censorship in the same way the lonely kid who no one wants to play with cannot be described as being censored in any meaningful sense of the word. Honestly I find it a worrying trend to be sure, but to portray individual free actions as censorship is to make the concept of censorship meaningless; It conflates the real dangers of authoritarian censorship with ordinary choices & biases that we take for granted every day.