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Parler, Web Hosts, and Masterpiece Cakes
Parler lost its rented server space with Amazon Web Services. Parler also found its phone apps booted off the Apple and Google app stores. This is not the “destruction” of Parler – not unless Parler was on such shaky ground that it cannot be rebuilt. This is certainly hamstringing it, but if this is a “death sentence”, then it is one that is easily overcome with cold hard cash (would that the Reaper were so easily fended off on more fleshly concerns). We need perspective here, and an honest reckoning of what happened, how, and why. We also need to yet again yank the plank from our own eye, for it was just a short while ago that we were adamantly defending another business for refusing paying clientele: I speak of none other than Masterpiece Cakes.
First, let’s get the technical stuff out of the way – understanding how Parler was built, and how it planned to make money for its creators (let’s not fool ourselves into thinking it was all charity work) is key to understanding its demise. Web sites have to be located on computers. You can make a website on your laptop and share it with the rest of the internet if you want. Users just would need to know the numerical address in either IPV4 or IPV6 to find it. If you want to make it easier to find then you would have to register a domain name, and then map that domain name to your server address. Now suppose your little website got really popular because its topic was fun and lovable – let’s say, for the sake of argument, that your website was all about your pet bird. If you had just a residential internet connection, after a point your neighbors would start to complain that traffic to your laptop was killing their own connections. Plus, your laptop has limited processing power to keep serving page views out – and your addition of a little bird forum doubled traffic to the point where your laptop’s cooling fan failed from overuse. How do you fix these issues?
You scale up. You either pay your local ISP for a better connection that’s isolated from the neighborhood’s shared node, and has more bandwidth, or you take your overworked laptop somewhere that has a better hookup. And you replace the laptop with a server. Maybe several in a cluster that appear as one to outsiders (after all, you’ve got bird videos now too, and a bird podcast, and a bird supply store). You also need a moderator because you found your forum was being used to orchestrate illegal bird smuggling. Maybe, instead of spending all that money on equipment, you rent server space elsewhere – a web host who has an entire server farm just for this purpose- that way you can still run it from your home. But now, you no longer control your data – not fully. And it turns out the server host has some other rules in place too.
For one, this host says that he’s not going to accept liability for anything illegal with his clients’ websites, and he’s not going to act as relay (a forwarder) to porn sites, terrorist sites, animal cruelty, etc. Your moderator took care of the smuggling ring, but there’s a bird furry group that’s gotten weird, and (for reasons you cannot fathom) the image of Tweety Bird, once innocuous, has taken on a meme life of its own as a symbol for an unsavory political group. Your host notices that a lot of inbound traffic to your site is being relayed from some of these Tweety Bird groups, and warns you to deal with it or he’ll boot you.
The final straw was when several Bird Liberation Front affiliated members spent a long and seedy weekend warning about a coming war on Kentucky Fried Chicken and Tyson Chicken, and come Monday one of them shot two fast-food workers and tried to deep fry their shoes. The headlines wrote themselves: “Bird Brained Brawler, Egged On To Deep Fry Footwear.” Your host canceled your service. Do you have the (ahem) nest egg to now buy your own servers to get going again?
Unfair? Maybe, but you can hardly blame the web host for not wanting the liability or the publicity. Writ larger, this is Parler’s situation. They were built from the beginning on rented webspace through Amazon – they never controlled their own hardware. Worse for them, they relied heavily on creating a site that was primarily geared towards mobile access, through apps. Both their cloud host and the ecosystem for their apps come with all manner of terms and conditions under which they would do business.
Parler billed itself as being some sort of center for “free speech”, with hardly anything in the way of content moderation or dreaded “censorship”. From its launch, therefore, Parler was immediately peopled not just with users wanting to get away from the moral censoriousness of Twitter, but with all manner of other users – folks that would make Alex Jones look like the voice of cool reason. And such people did as such people do and began to trade in conspiracy theories – QAnon and more besides. Forbes noted over the weekend that the planning did, in fact, occur on Parler and other platforms. Parler had been warned repeatedly in the past months to deal with what AWS was seeing go across its servers, and had been warned by both Apple and Google that their app would be removed at some point. The storming of the Capitol, whose pre-planning was evident on Parler, was the last straw, making “at some point” into “right now”.
Parler made its choice not to moderate – I can tell you from my own time here as a moderator that moderation is necessary. Most users of Ricochet never saw the posts and members who would show up and start dropping racist and anti-semitic rants, or used their image libraries to stash pornography (Max has seen this), because they were eliminated quickly. You could deride that as “censorship” if you will – if you are determined to treat “censorship” as a universally dirty word.
But then again, wasn’t Masterpiece Cakes engaged in a different sort of “censorship”? Wasn’t Masterpiece Cakes honored for exercising their right not to serve clientele in ways found unconscionable? The persistent lunatic who kept suing Masterpiece at one time demanded a satanic cake with protruding sex toys. If we honor Masterpiece Cakes for refusing such clientele, why are Amazon, Apple, and Google condemned for refusing Parler’s business? For that is what they have done.
The lunatic who wanted the pornographic cakes in Colorado, we insisted, had every right to bake his own (quite literally) damned cake. By the same token, only money is hindering Parler from buying its own servers and internet connections, and firing it all back up again. As for the app stores? How long has Ricochet run without an app? And has anyone heard of jailbreaking IOS or sideloading apps on Android phones?
If Parler failed to examine the risks to its strategy when they started, that’s their problem. They wanted to become immediately as large as Twitter, but lacked the capital to do so. I’ve seen that sort of failure before in other businesses – we call it vaporware. Twitter, Facebook, Apple, Google, and Amazon all started small, with narrowly defined markets and concepts, then grew from that base. They also learned on the way (and are still learning) through both failures and successes (anyone remember Google Circles?). Anyone hoping to unseat them should be prepared to do the same. Parler tried to jump in at the deep end without knowing how to swim, in a pool they didn’t own, while allowing others to dirty the pool. Now they’ve been thrown out. That’s business.
And nobody should be compelled to do business with them. Not unless you want Masterpiece Cakes to also bake pornographic cakes for a vengeful madman.
Published in Science & Technology
Not promoting a post to Main Feed is speech suppression? If a film doesn’t get an Oscar, is it being discriminated against? I’ve actually seen that argument. I didn’t expect it from our own side.
They are being taken down because they are a free speech, conservative-friendly alternative to Twitter that was growing rapidly. If failure to moderate people plotting to engage in illegal behavior was the reason, Twitter and Facebook would also be deplatformed.
Nonsense.
They own their own server farms. Parler has tried to imitate Twitter but without the technical backbone to do it.
That’s not what I said or implied. What prompted my saying that was a strong sense from what was expressed by members on a number of posts that there had been a shift after the election and posts of quality and interest recommended by members that would previously have been promoted were not. I don’t recall specifics but I must have considered the expressions credible.
Your response indicates you consider there was no change in the post-election treatment. Maybe, I don’t know.
I did, and he wasn’t ‘threatening’ you, he was telling you that the Leftist fascist who are already in power, and institutionally have been for awhile, are going to come for you, and by that time no one will come to your aid because they will have learned that they are on their own.
And after that, they will need to own their own internet security company, credit card company, ad-hosting company……
Forbes?
The same Forbes that declared that if a publicly listed company hired someone who worked in the Trump administration that Forbes would downgrade the ratings of that company.
Dude, Forbes is leading the purge, you can’t trust what they write.
By the way, the “hang Mike Pence”was trending on Twitter all weekend, did Forbes call for Twitter to be deplatformed too? In the interest of fairness?
Is that all I have to do to get my way on this site? Become a Reagan level member, and management will respect me in the morning? LOL. If only. ICYMI, a Reagan member very publicly downsized this past week due to unhappiness with management decisions here. (He’s not the first, and I don’t expect he’ll be the last. I can think of another, very vocal, former Reagan member who has also cut back on his support due to feeling undervalued here.) That’s a member’s right, and no-one else’s business unless he makes it so, but I’ll go on record (as I have before) that being a Reagan Member doesn’t buy one a hell of a lot of privilege (nor should it). At least one Reagan member has been banned, and the vanishingly small number of us that remain are certainly not marching in lockstep when it comes to political opinion. There are many valid criticisms that can be made of Ricochet management, but blanket accusations of sucking up to Reagan members merely because of our “rank” isn’t one of them.
I know I may have misspoken- I was juggling a couple conversations. You are correct that is my stance. I’m open to hearing the pros and cons of each side.
Twitter and Facebook stocks dropped after deleting Trump’s account. That seems to have been driven in significant part by the actions of foreign governments. Populist governments have taken the most aggressive and visible actions targeted at social media, but many non-Trump friendly governments are now pushing to disentangle themselves from the US tech cartel. US financial institutions are now following suit in their domestic political actions, and I suspect foreign organizations will be considering their exposure to US political whims in that sector as well. Our ruling elites may very well crush MAGA, but it will be costly.
We have a single Reagan member who has continually peddled the “collusion” narrative past the point where it is “a conspiracy theory that makes Ricochet look like a bunch of loons” or however the CoC phrases it.
I was referring to him.
I’ll not disagree with you here, but your comment misses the point to some degree. Yes, newspapers always had the right not to cover a story. But papers had letters-to-the-editor sections, and any paper worth its salt would print the letters from its contrarians first. Subject to neutrally-applied standards of conduct, of course. They printed opinions with which they disagreed, because they felt it was their obligation to our culture to let people speak freely, even though they had the right not to.
We don’t value free speech because it’s in the Constitution. It’s in the Constitution because we value free speech. Or we used to, at least. We have become in large part a society that judges you entirely on the political opinions you hold, and any deviation from an arbitrary and ever-changing orthodoxy could cost you your livelihood.
I know you were. Nevertheless, that would not have been clear to someone who doesn’t know this site as well as you and I do (this post is on the main feed, after all), and your comment (which didn’t single him out) indicted Reagan members as a class, with its implication that we are granted special concessions by management. I don’t believe that’s the case, and I wanted to make that clear. Thanks.
Supression of free speech is the whole point of Ricochet. It explicitly moderates posts and comments.
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that this “cutting off ones nose to spite ones face” post by SkipSul has gotten so much agreement.
Elimination of Free Speech is an explicit goal of the left and they control the modern means of communication. It is sad and dangerous that Free Speech is no longer part of American culture. I guess we were lucky to have made it for almost a quarter century.
Yes, and I remember it was always a kind of local bragging rights to say “Hey! They printed my letter!” But they didn’t print all of the letters they received, and they certainly didn’t print the letters from the cranks and wingnuts – not unless such letters were sufficiently nutty to provide a fair share of entertainment value. But they were selective, and not just because space was limited, but because they all operated on the understanding that some things fell outside the bounds of sanity, decency, and reality.
And outside the bounds we had Weekly World News, The National Enquirer, The Star, and an assortment of local UFO truther rags you’d find in the “FREE!” stacks by the bulletin boards in the grocery store foyer. None of them, however, demanded, or was allowed to demand that any grocery store or news stand carry them, and from time to time these stores would say “Hell no, I’m not putting that out!”
We knew then that “free speech” still meant that you had to pay out of your own pocket to publish anything.
And we all knew who was respectable, who was nuts, and who was worse than nuts – “free speech” never meant that you had a right to make others listen, or pay for your distribution.
On the internet, are all such realms equal? Do all such realms have an equal “right” to demand others facilitate their distribution?
Ultimately this is the flip-side of the Left’s ridiculous demand for Net Neutrality.
The Net Neutrals deny the right of ISPs to do traffic shaping, and prioritize some traffic over others, especially for people willing to pay for priority.
Now we have the Right’s version of Net Neutrality – declaring that somehow server owners cannot distinguish between customers, and must host anything anyone asks.
Well, if we stick with our founders on Negative Rights, then both claims are terrible – declaring you have a claim on something they own.
That doesn’t pass muster.
Let’s see – founders of Ricochet pay with their own money to create a site where people and write and post pretty much whatever they want, so long as it sticks to the CoC.
And that is suppressing free speech?
I don’t disagree with you on any of this, and I have no problem with a provider, whether a newspaper or a social media site, enforcing conduct standards. But that’s not all that’s happening here. If I express, as civilly as possible, that Rachel MacKinnon should not be permitted to compete in women’s bicycle races, and only sets world records because she is in fact a man, that opinion is likely to be censored from Twitter. The tech oligarchs actively oppose the expression of certain opinions that differ from those held by their most sensitive employees. They have the right to do so, but it is nevertheless an un-American practice.
We strayed from the point being made about controlling speech at Ricochet, the point had nothing to do with the CoC. I was reiterating a complaint I saw on more than one member post of quality that had been recommended for promotion by large numbers of members but was not promoted. Some members went on to say, IIRC that management had determined that certain discussion of election fraud should not be promoted and this was the point of the discussion. Management could certainly clear this up with a statement or members can correct me if I have this wrong. I think @skipsul gets some reaction to his post’s point on Parler because of other clearer unjustified arbitrary moves by Big Tech like removal of Brandon Straka’s #Walkaway Facebook page displaying the exact bias that Zuckerberg has said before Congress does not or should not occur.
Yeah – that was clearly Facebook massively over-reacting. Straka was not the only such group affected.
The tennis star, Martina Navratilova, offered up her opinion that allowing transgender “women” to compete in women’s tennis would be unfair to women and hurt women’s tennis. She was harshly criticized for that opinion and she offered an apology in response. She still posts on twitter, but she seems to stay away from the transgender issue.
I do, however, see a few women who have written books critical of the concept of “268 genders” do have twitter accounts and post frequently. I wonder how easy it is to get your twitter account cancelled. Is it just a matter of coming out in favor of the flat tax or defending Brett Kavanaugh? Or does it require one to be really pugnacious?
I agree with Skipsul, but also am outraged by the other actual censoring that is done by the Big Tech companies, as well as the actual restraint of trade.
Two things still need to happen:
1) Alphabet, FB, Amazon, Twitter face breakups due to Sherman violations (e.g., Rumble’s lawsuit against Google/YouTube; force Google to spin off YouTube, FB to give up Instagram, Amazon to split off its media wing- books/publishing and downloadable files, Apple splits iTunes off from the product divisions, etc).
2) Rich libertarian and conservative entrepreneurs (Koch, Thiel, Anschutz, etc.) build web backbone systems to enable right-of-center dissemination of information honestly (not olitically) moderated: server farms, app stores, promotion of honest search engines and the like.
This is what I noted earlier: the real problem people have with Twitter et al. is that they have obvious double standards, are opaque about what they do and why, and then are full of ex post facto justification when they block or shut things down.
I was once a participant in conservative web forum where the one thing that would get you banned immediately was to defend then Speaker John Boehner against criticisms from the House Freedom Caucus. If you offered up the view that Boehner, not Jim Jordan, had the better of the argument, you’d get banned very quickly.
I know because I got banned in a nanosecond. But the web hosts were firm in their attitude: This is our web site. We get to decide who posts here.
Given the leanings of the tech libertarians, I see this as unlikely – often they are the ones funding the weirdest and most frightening stuff out there (like the trans madness). They are often, frankly, borderline insane trans humanists with their own agendas. You see this as it is where so many of them are socially fringe (often with sex obsessions and a drug-fueled futurism of immortality), but fiscally greedy penny pinchers.
I’d trust Thiel or Koch or the rest about as far as the end of my nose, if that far.
I used to be very active on a Total Vegetarian discussion forum. The doctor who created the forum wanted the forum to support the total vegetarian diet for health reasons, not reasons of animal rights.
There were a few moderators trying to keep the discussion civil. But occasionally there would be people from the ethical vegan community posting things that had less to do with healthy eating and more to do with animal rights.
So, eventually the moderators started clamping down. They would also remove posts that were political in nature, rather than relevant to the topic of optimal nutrition, successfully treating diabetes, heart disease, autoimmune disease and so on.
But it’s not like we had a “right” to post whatever we wanted with no consequence. It seems there is this attitude, on both the right and the left, that there should be no consequence to posting beyond the bounds of the host.
Slate Star Codex was a forum popular with some friends of mine (taken down due to threat of doxxing from the New York Times). Its owner allowed things to be pretty free ranging, but also warned people that he had the final right to boot people who were being jerks, at his own discretion, and without having to justify all the reasons. He would try to warn such people first, at least most of the time, but not always, not if the issues were severe enough.
I realize that losing an election is hard thing to accept. But people who are mature are capable of taking a “we’ll work on winning the next election” attitude.
What Trump and his allies did was filed all kinds of lawsuits in state and federal court and then got repeatedly defeated in those legal venues. Then they tried to counsel Arizona Governor Doug Ducey and Brad Raffensperger to side with them. They tried to convinced the state legislatures to pass alternative slates of electors.
They tried to get the US Supreme Court to take their case (at least state attorney generals did). Over and over they kept failing. Then they got the hairbrained idea that Mike Pence could unilaterally reject electoral votes from certified slates of electors.
All of these bizarre tactics have failed and now many corporations have said, “Enough!” One can almost sympathize with a parent to takes away his children’s toys because he continues to be disruptive. This is one of the consequences of conservatives rejecting the idea that character matters. Many conservatives warned that “character is destiny,” only to be scoffed at by the Trumpian crowd.
Well, now the Trumpian crowd doesn’t know what hit them.
Do you know what a Communist is?
Someone who doesn’t let you post conspiracy theories on their web site?