Agonize In Hell, Parler
Tony Romm and Rachel Lerman, reporting for The Washington Post:
Amazon suspended the pro-Trump social network Parler from its Web-hosting service this weekend, a move that threatens to darken the site indefinitely after its users glorified the recent riot at the U.S. Capitol.
Describing Parler merely as a “pro-Trump social network” is a bit rosy, let’s not get it twisted. From racism, sexism, homophobia, antisemitism, and white supremacy, to outright calls for and plans to commit physical violence and anti-democratic terrorism/insurrection like what we saw at the U.S. Capitol, hate speech and vitriol are omnipresent and essential elements of the Parler experience. It is/was a home and a breeding ground for Nazis and Proud Boys.
The e-commerce and Web-hosting giant said Parler had violated its terms of service given its inadequate content-moderation practices, adding in a letter that it would implement its punishment just before midnight Pacific time Monday.
The move by Amazon Web Services, or AWS, marks the latest and most crippling blow for the pro-Trump social network, which has emerged as a haven for conservative users who have fled more mainstream Silicon Valley sites that crack down on harmful, viral falsehoods online. Earlier this week, Apple and Google removed Parler’s app from their stores for smartphone downloads, similarly citing concerns that posts on Parler could contribute to violence.
Parler’s whole schtick was that they were going to be an unmoderated online space for free speech, but they have never been the beacon of free speech they claimed to be. The free speech cover was a thin veneer for an operation intended to provide a Wild West environment for Trump’s base to drive one another closer and closer to the edge of complete delusion and radicalization.
Private companies like Amazon, Apple, and Google have absolutely no constitutional obligation to provide their services to companies who violate their rules or whose values they disagree with. Facebook and Twitter have no obligation to allow users who incite violence and inspire coups to enjoy their platforms. Publishers have no obligation to publish books by seditious senators. It is not censorship and it is not a violation of Parler’s or anyone else’s first amendment rights, it’s the free market at work. Parler, immediately upon its launch, became an infinite cesspool of hatred. Since hate speech is not protected by the first amendment, it’s important to understand that not only can private companies refuse to do business with them, but even if it were Congress that had banned Parler, it still wouldn’t be an infringement of anyone’s first amendment rights. However, that’s exactly what Republicans have tried to assert.
Over the past few days, the far right has gotten a small taste of the social justice they deserve for the first time as the big tech companies have finally stood up to them, one by one. Faced with this incomprehensible reality where their actions have actual consequences, far right mouthpieces from Capitol Hill to trailer parks have been left spluttering, the only semi-coherent talking point they’ve been able to stitch together is that the radical left and big tech have teamed up to cancel and deplatform conservatives. Your dime-a-dozen Trumpers are embarrassing themselves by advertising their primitive understandings of “freedom of speech,” while their Republican elected officials CONTNUE to mislead those very same idiots by perpetuating misinformation about what type of speech the first amendment actually protects and from whom. Cynical assholes Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley have learned no lessons. They deserve to be expelled from the Senate and they deserve to be shamed publicly, never to be taken seriously again.
Bringing things full circle, Parler was funded by the Mercer family, who were directly involved in the Cambridge Analytica scandal that unethically collected mountains of personal data from American voters’ Facebook pages and used it to build profiles of them, which were then used to send them highly targeted ads designed to influence how they voted. Most people familiar with the Cambridge Analytica scandal know that the Trump campaign paid them to help target and turn out persuadable voters in key precincts of swing states, but most people don’t know that before Cambridge Analytica was hired by the Trump campaign (which was only after Trump won the nomination) they had previously been helping none other than Ted Cruz who, with their help and despite his perpetual “I just shit the bed” face, went from the bottom of the list of serious contenders to the last man standing before Trump ultimately clenched the nomination.
Hopefully Parler won’t find another company willing to host their site for any amount of money, but if Republicans are good at anything, it’s finding others whose morality is trumped by their greed.