When I heard that Amazon Web Services dumped Parler, I was pretty happy. Parler has been home to so much violent reactionary content that it’s hard to see its disappearance as anything but good. I felt the same thing about Trump’s ban from Twitter. He refused to shut the hell up, so I was glad Twitter did it for him.
That’s why when I saw the Electronic Freedom Foundation and the ACLU raise some concerns about these events, I raised an eyebrow. I respect them both a lot, and they’re both quite progressive, so I was confused and surprised that they weren’t quite pleased. Upon reviewing their concerns, I came to feel that they had a point.
The Electronic Freedom Foundation’s argument is more substantive, so I’ll discuss it first. Amazon Web Services is fairly close to the foundation of the internet. At the very top you have platforms like Twitter, which have clear and restrictive codes of conduct with their own distinct styles. At the bottom you have Internet Service Providers, who we generally expect to not get in the way of our use of the internet, unless we’re doing something blatantly illegal. If you get banned from Twitter, you have options: You have Facebook, or Instagram, or Reddit, or Tumblr, or Telegram, or… many other options! But the closer you get to the foundation of the internet, the harder it is to find an alternative. This makes the choices of Amazon Web Services a much bigger deal than those of Twitter.
Here’s the kicker. Amazon Web Services did so at a moment of intense political pressure. Explicit calls to violence have been consistently present on Parler. AWS only took action when they couldn’t afford not to, politically speaking. This is concerning because political pressure is very fickle. More often than not, almost tautologically, it is directed against marginalized people, those who have little power and say. As Noah Berlatsky outlined in Liberal Currents, those who whose speech is suppressed aren’t typically those who have something controversial to say, but those whose very existence in public life is controversial. We all accept that the current President must exist in public life (or else our political system just collapses), but we’re a little less unified on if sex workers should be given our consideration. The nature of Parler’s suspension from Amazon Web Services is a problem, even though Parler itself ideally shouldn’t exist.
The ACLU strikes a similar tone regarding Trump’s ban from Twitter. People have been calling for Trump to be removed from Twitter for years, due to his tendency to spread misinformation and stoke violence. Twitter only banned Trump when it became politically easy to do so.
These actions have been defended because they are private companies, and they have a right to make these decisions. Some people pointed out that Twitter banning Trump is a good example of private companies striking back against the government, establishing independence and expressing their strong political freedoms. Closer inspection reveals it’s not quite so simple. Twitter and Amazon did not make these decisions based on their own rules or whims, but rather in a moment when it became very easy to make those decisions, and virtually impossible not to. With Democrats coming into power and Republicans abandoning Trump, their actions were certainly tainted with political expediency — an expediency which all-too-often is aimed not at those in power, but at those with none.
We got lucky with which way the winds were blowing this time. We likely won’t be so lucky next time.