I do not really get this discussion about censorship. I don't see any censorship here, I see (rather large) companies exercising their contractual freedom in highly centralized environment. I'll admit that these times there is a narrowly defined narrative what is the right thing to say and think and often companies trying to avoid customer unhappiness in form of a shitstorm tend to follow that narrative to please their customer/user base.
But since you are basically unheard/invisible if you're not on Twitter (anymore) it is a form of censorship nonetheless nowadays. It is somehow ironic how many
BTC-enthusiasts actually use Twitter and not something like
mastodon. Decentralization does not only fix the monetary system, it would also fix social networks and energy production etc.. Email for example is decentralized, gmail might kick you, but then you can use hotmail (or go straight to protonmail if you're one of the brighter candles on the cake) or even register your own domain and run it from your living room on a rpi.
If Amazon decides not to deal anymore with Parler, that is fine by me. If Jack Dorsey thinks the orange nutjob is not worth the trouble anymore, that's his decision. People unhappy with that or missing the wisdom of Donnie should vote with their feet/d and use another company for their needs.
What keeps them from running their own infrastructure? Mind you, that was actually the thought behind the internet, being decentralized and everybody being able to run a service on their own computers.
One addition to the above, I might have left the impression that you and I are customers of Twitter or Parler or Facebook, that is not what I meant. We are in fact a supplier, we deliver the product that Facebook sells to advertisers, governments and aliens (basically everbody who pays for it). In turn we are paid for our generous delivery (you'd be astonished what the data about you - your data is worth to them) with "free" services that we can use. This bargain seems obviously too good for most of us to take care and take things into our own hands (i.e. using open standards like
Jabber) and run our own services or use easily exchangeable small service providers that offer that to us for a small fee.
Anything that is removed, is by definition, censorship, whatever the motivation for removing it. Even if there are 100 twitters, if the industry as a whole deletes posts of a certain type, it has the same effect as mass censorship.
To ensure we remain a free society, censorship must be fought whatever the form. Even if that form is the profit seeking of media companies.
There is just too much temptation for political corruption and manipulation of opinions by deciding what gets removed and what remains. Only laws should determine that because laws are voted on by our representatives and can't as easily be manipulated as an employee making a biased decision about a post.
I beg to differ. I generally agree about censorship being bad and to fight it wherever possible.
Censorship in my definition is if LE forces your registrar to withdraw your DNS server delegation so that you basically disappear from the intertubes.
Though I believe that everything already is prone to fail when we made companies provide platforms for formation of opinion in the general public (that is insane in the first place).
Twitter is for fun at most, not more. If your business or your free speech depends on having access to Twitter (or whatever service) there is so much that has gone wrong before that. Companies can and should not be expected to be just good for the sake of it, where necessary they should be regulated but otherwise they are just expected to be greedy and profit driven, which is fine as this makes money to live for everybody.
What I am trying to say is that if democracy needs to rely on one or more huge companies to play nice and fair - we're essentially FUBAR'd. Contractual freedom needs no fixing, the infrastructure we rely on for formation of opinion does need a lot of fixing though.
I am aware that the large players like Facebook, Twitter etc. would like to see themselves positioned as communication providers instead of content providers, so that they can say "look, we're like ATT, we don't know what people are talking about over our channels and it's essentially their own business". I disagree with that, they have a website where they publish content to earn money, much like a newspaper or blog etc. and they should be held legally responsible for what is posted there.
If Amazon decides not to deal anymore with Parler, that is fine by me.
What keeps them from running their own infrastructure?
Mind you, not only Amazon kicked them off their infrastructure, but at the same time Apple and Google removed their mobile app.
Feels very centralized and coordinated.
That's what I am saying (even I didn't mention mobile market). Decentralization would for example mean that everybody can write software ('an app') for your mobile and publish it on their own website to install with a click. Being so heavily dependent from the goodwill of one single company is something I could never accept and therefor I never had and will never have any sort of smartphone.
