Thread by @mala

Some thoughts on this: there are alternatives to AWS that you can switch to relatively easily. But not many, and I imagine most of the decent ones will also reject Parler.

https://twitter.com/BuzzFeedNews/status/1348089793213837319

There are also *technical* alternatives to AWS-like systems. You can buy a bunch of servers and stick 'em in a rack somewhere. It's what everyone did in the old days. But that takes time, and is fragile. Unless they've already planned for this, I imagine they'll be downtime.

They'll also be vulnerable, in this scenario, to DDOS attacks (unless Cloudflare agrees to work with them, or they pay serious money to stave off those attacks). I haven't seen any indication that Parler is any good at handling even their own users' loads.

There's a large community of traditionally marginalised groups and political outsiders -- leftists and anarchist-adjacent, repressed minorities, government critics in authoritarian regimes, who have long faced being censored, or anticipated censorship on dominant platforms>>

...who have built communications systems that are independent of these large companies. But it's generally not as "user-friendly" as large commercial operations and it requires commitment to run.

My concerns here are twofold: one, longstanding, is that if groups on the right move to these platforms, those who have previously recognised their importance but are privileged enough not to need these escape valves will attempt to outlaw or discredit them.

The second though, is that a wide tranche of conservatives (not just violent white supremacists) will see their Twitter alternative snuffed out, and deduce that there is no alternative for their voice, and that the Internet as a whole is censoring them.

And the worst of all is when we get both: when conservatives think that the whole Internet is controlled by liberals, and the left thinks that the (non-Big Tech-controlled) Internet is a hive of fascists.

It's this weird left/right anti-Net unity, where both sides attack the underlying infrastructure, for reasons that are wrong for different reasons, that I dread. We've already seen it with Section 230, where Trump and anti-Trump forces unite in calling for its revocation.

As ever, I'm not too worried about the silencing effects on mainstream voices (or even extreme voices with their current strangehold on US public debates). I'm worried about everyone else who needs a voice online, because they lack one in any other part of their polity.