People have to understand that this is what free speech actually looks like. Some people want to say some things, and other people don’t want to say them, so the latter choose not to help the former. In this case, the people running Amazon decided not to help the people running Parler anymore.
And it is decentralized. No central authority told Amazon to drop Parler; Amazon decided on their own.
I think a lot of young people came up thinking that “free speech” meant no one ever gets shut down for any reason. And they grew up thinking that tech platforms are like the government; neutral and inalienable. Neither was true and IMO it is very good in the long run for people to now understand and accept this.
> And it is decentralized. No central authority told Amazon to drop Parler; Amazon decided on their own.
Actually, Amazon didn't decide on their own—which is why none of us are surprised by their "decision". It was made for them, somewhere else. But where? By who? How?
You'd think on a site supposedly interested in computer science that people would be aware that distributed consensus is a thing. You don't need a literal monarch (or a conspiracy—same thing), there are many ways to achieve consensus in a distributed fashion that are extremely robust.
In fact, distributed consensus (as everyone here already knows) is substantially more robust overall. (Cockroach is more robust than Postgres, etc.) With a monarch, you can simply replace them—it's no harder than swapping in a new CEO. But with distributed consensus, the entire apparatus has to be torn down simultaneously. Yikes!
So ask yourself, what institutions are involved in forming consensus in the US today? Are they government, private, or both? Are they democratic or oligarchic? Etc. We know it can be done, the only question is: where are the nodes? How do they communicate? What's the protocol used? Etc.
The US today runs a distributed consensus algorithm that made Amazon's decision about Parler for them, i.e. the values and decisions made by that consensus filter down to supposedly "independent" businesses like Amazon, who implement them. And if Amazon disobeys that consensus, everyone else in the system (especially the press) will gang up on them until they do….
tl;dr There's nothing independent about what Amazon did, distributed political decision making in the US decided their actions for them.
Let me put it this way: I can give Amazon zero attention and still know what they are going to do, simply by paying attention elsewhere.
Can you? I suspect you could too. We all can, none of this is a secret.
So…is Amazon a node in the political decision making apparatus if you can ignore them entirely and still predict their behavior? I would argue that is strong evidence Amazon is not a decision node when it comes to political decision making, they are a follower node. I would argue that all mainstream US businesses are follower nodes.
Non-political business questions? Sure. I agree US businesses like Amazon are mostly free to act independently. Shutting down Parler, though, was a political decision. An expression of power. In that realm, Amazon was not the one in charge.
And it is decentralized. No central authority told Amazon to drop Parler; Amazon decided on their own.
I think a lot of young people came up thinking that “free speech” meant no one ever gets shut down for any reason. And they grew up thinking that tech platforms are like the government; neutral and inalienable. Neither was true and IMO it is very good in the long run for people to now understand and accept this.