arctotherium Profile picture
Mar 4 16 tweets 7 min read Read on X
Another thread on the closure of the Internet. Amazon, like other major tech giants, had little content policy beyond "no illegal content, spam or scams/fraud" in 2015 and by 2020 had a well developed censorship infrastructure for both the web store and AWS.
Amazon is particularly important for two reasons: (1) AWS making it, like Google Search, a major Internet chokepoint and (2) 50% book and 80% e-book market share; Amazon banning a book is the closest a non-classified book can really come to being banned in the US.
The first cracks in Amazon's neutrality appeared in June 2015, when a media blitz and political pressure campaign (sparked by Dylan Roof) led to Amazon removing all Confederate flag (a completely normal American symbol) merchandise from the site. Image
By August 2018, Amazon was banning "items that Amazon deems offensive," in this case Nazi-themed merchandise. Note the direct intervention of a Democratic lawmaker (Keith Ellison) - this was not a purely private endeavor. Image
Again in response to Congress, Amazon removed Proud Boys, a civic nationalist patriotic group that semi-regularly fought antifa, memorabilia in 2018 (they would later do the same to QAnon). Needless to say, antifa merch was not pulled. Image
After a threatening letter from nine Democratic lawmakers in 2019, Amazon banned most gun accessories, parts, and ammunition from the site, including basic things like slings and rails. Image
By 2019, Amazon was accustomed to taking listings down in response to news articles [not "online outrage", important distinction], such as innocuous (really) Auschwitz Christmas ornaments (it was part of a series of ornaments themed around Polish cities). Image
Mein Kampf was removed in 2020. Needless to say "Quotations from Chairman Mao" and "The Wretched of the Earth" were not. Image
By 2021, even fairly academic and tame criticism of the transgender movement [which barely existed 10 years prior], "When Harry Became Sally" could be banned from Amazon and thus cut off from any mass audience. Image
Amazon started going after non-illegal (they kicked wikileaks off in 2010 because wikileaks was illegal) sites using AWS in 2019, by threatening another host provider, Epik, for providing services to 8Chan (which was not hosted on AWS directly). Image
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They did the same with Gab, another right-wing Twitter alternative (which was also banned by Microsoft Azure). Image
Amazon Web Services was politicized dramatically in 2021 when it kicked Parler, an alternative to Twitter that gained popularity when Trump was banned, from the platform, destroying the app (which was simultaneously banned by both Apple and Google from their app stores). Image
Not being a social media site, Amazon's moderation/content removal/censorship apparatus is much less noticeable than YouTube or Reddit or Twitter or Facebook, but it was built around the same time (2015-2019) and performed (and performs) similar functions.
I have not touched COVID/lockdown related removals.
Subjectively, one of the big differences between Amazon and Google/YouTube/Reddit was the importance of US Congress; direct threats from Democratic lawmakers precipitated several major steps on the censorship ladder, whereas the EU and UK were more important for the others.

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More from @arctotherium42

Jun 2
Thread with excerpts from Richard Pipes' Property and Freedom (1999). Pipes is a historian of Russia, and the thesis of the book is that private property, as something distinct and protected from public power and sovereignty, is indispensable to human freedom. Image
One of the fundamental differences between Russia and the rest of Europe lay in the weak development of private property; one of the major themes of Western philosophical history is the benefits and drawbacks of private property; Russian philosophers unanimously condemn it. Image
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Freedom, as used by Pipes, includes political freedom, legal freedom, economic freedom, and personal rights. It does not include the right to public support ("freedom from want"); such 'rights' are at best a moral claim and at worst an unearned privilege. Image
Read 67 tweets
Jun 1
Red state pension funds tend to vote with management if management is providing good returns (ie, doing their job); blue state pension funds tend to vote with management if the company does leftist things (ie, ESG, or not paying CEOs very much). Image
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This reflects a general difference in attitude towards institutions; rightists prefer institutions do what they were created for (eg police should fight crime, the military should fight wars, companies should make money doing their business, schools should teach)...
...while left-wingers want every institution to have pushing the Party Line as its #1 priority (extremely totalitarian in that regard). The formers produces a better society, the latter is more politically powerful but destroys everything in the long run.
Read 5 tweets
Jun 1
Training an LLM to be more politically evenhanded (as opposed to left-wing, as almost all LLMs are - so more right-wing) makes it more egalitarian in how it values the lives of people of different races without training to do so. PCT = Political Consistency Training. Image
LLMs trained in this way also value members of different religions, political creeds, and public figures coded left vs right more equally. Image
Almost all notable LLMs except Grok are left-wing on the US political spectrum, but in a very particular way, sort of like a superhumanly-knowledgeable Redditor or Wikipedia editor from the year 2018. Image
Read 4 tweets
May 9
Since 2009, medical schools have had to prove they sufficiently discriminate against white men ("achieve mission-appropriate diversity outcomes") to get accredited. Image
White men are now significantly underrepresented among med school students. Image
Fortunately, competence isn't that important in doctors, so purging white men in favor of "underrepresented minorities" (blacks, LatinX) who can't pass clinical exams shouldn't matter. Image
Read 5 tweets
May 8
European IQ's rising due to natural selection (as measured by PGS) continuing into the modern era whereas it stalled in East Asia could have been predicted from Gregory Clark's genealogical studies in both regions. Image
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Clark found that "survival of the richest" was the rule in England from 1300-1880 or so, with huge differences in surviving offspring by class and this was much weaker in Qing China because higher class women didn't have more kids due to elite polygamy. Image
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(IQ is not the only trait that goes into income or wealth, of course, so selection for wealth is only indirectly selection for IQ and also selects for a package of other traits, some of which are collective goods like IQ and some of which are not.)
Read 9 tweets
May 8
The Bancroft Prize (one of the most prestigious history awards, given by a panel of historians for works on diplomacy or the history of the Americas) was given in 2000 to someone claiming guns were really rare in colonial America (he committed fraud by changing quotes).
This should have been obvious nonsense to anyone who knows anything at all about colonial America, of course, and yet a panel of professional historians thought it was work at the pinnacle of the field until some random blogger pointed out all the fraud.
Read 4 tweets

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