[aksss]

> in people's minds only

Tell that to Parler. Or news stories censored as "misinformation" during an election (e.g. Biden laptop). Or people talking about COVID origins/therapeutics. Or specific criticism of China (e.g. Daryl Morey). Regardless of your alignment politically, the mechanics of censorship are what they are. The "target group" is a wildcard - any position that competently challenges/threatens the established order, even if that established order is the appearance of control. Today there may be a common thread between the issues above, but I tend to think that's one of convenience. Several decades ago, it wasn't conservatives complaining about censorship. The parties will revolve according to the orthodoxy of the day. Fundamentally it's a question of political principles (which should transcend - that is to say, stay consistent regardless of - parties, contemporary crises). What do you really believe in, politically, otherwise? The Party?

[wutwut5521]

The Parler situation was shoddy engineering, nothing else. They chose a hosting provider with a completely incompatible ToS for their application. There are thousands of “free speech” providers out there. To make an analogy, they tried to publish porn on their Disney.com profile.

It was somewhat funny to watch them completely blow their one moment in time due to sheer incompetence.

[aksss]

I don't think that's accurate at all. Parler was condemned because of a much publicized narrative of its role in hosting speech related to J6 protests, right? And it was shown contemporaneously that there was far more activity on other platforms (facebook) coordinating those protests than on Parler, though they suffered not. Nonetheless, Parler was blacklisted - app pulled (which looked like selective enforcement of ToS). When they attempted to set up on other platforms it was difficult to find a home, in part due to similar de jure application of ToS, but also arguably due to a lack of substantive competition in that space. I say de jure application of ToS because the ToS are not applied consistently, and seem discretionary from the outside. It is not like porn on Disney, but more like (exactly like) talking politics on facebook. Sometimes it's okay, sometimes it's not. Leaving aside flagrantly bad examples of talking politics, your best predictor of how ToS will be enforced is by understanding the alignment of speech to the official institutional messaging. We can see this at work in a very recent example - talking about the COVID lab leak hypothesis would get you banned when the government was messaging (and invested in) a natural origin hypothesis. Now that they are not, such speech will not get you banned. The nature of the speech has not changed. Have the terms of service delineated these circumstances sufficiently? I would say not at all. We can infer what speech will be banned based on an acceptance criteria that is only loosely coupled to the actual language of the terms, and more easily explained by (documented) coordination between the government and social media platforms.

I think the "funny" you express may be schadenfreude based on your political alignment, but there are some transcendent and substantive issues of political principles that are worth examining (and I feel, criticizing) regardless of one's blue team/red team alignment. By transcendent, I mean these problems come back to bite both the red team and the blue team in time. This is classic "Cast it into the fire" type stuff.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajUlhaX9hQI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GI_fvDOUCu8

[ergocoder]

So, you agree there is a market that violates TOS of AWS.

Back to the original point, there you go. That is the market trump's social network targets.