@Rebelofnj,
Rebelofnj wrote:Biden says death toll from pandemic likely will top 500,000 next month, says it will take months 'for us to turn things around'
Joe Biden sure is a bad president. I can't wait until 2024 so we can put Mr. Trump back in charge.
Rebelofnj wrote:On personal note, my family and I have contracted COVID-19 in the last few months. Most recovered, some did not.
That's why I'm staying in a bunker until it's safe to come out.
Judge Refuses To Reinstate Parler After Amazon Shut It Down
January 21, 20213:14 PM ET
BOBBY ALLYN
Updated at 5:50 p.m. ET
A federal judge has refused to restore the social media site Parler after Amazon kicked the company off of its Web-hosting services over content seen as inciting violence.
The decision is a blow to Parler, an upstart that has won over Trump loyalists for its relatively hands-off approach to moderating content. The company sued Amazon over its ban, demanding reinstatement.
U.S. District Judge Barbara Rothstein sided with Amazon, which argued that Parler would not take down posts threatening public safety even in the wake of the attack on the U.S. Capitol and that it is within Amazon's rights to punish the company over its refusal.
"The Court rejects any suggestion that the public interest favors requiring [Amazon Web Services] to host the incendiary speech that the record shows some of Parler's users have engaged in," Rothstein wrote on Thursday. "At this stage, on the showing made thus far, neither the public interest nor the balance of equities favors granting an injunction in this case."
Parler's looser rules of engagement also attracted far-right activists among the some 15 million users who, the company says, posted messages before Amazon pulled the plug.
That anything-goes philosophy ran headlong into demands that social media platforms be held accountable for allowing rioters to discuss plans to storm the Capitol on the day Congress was certifying President Biden's election.
Shortly after the Jan. 6 attack, Parler began to feel the squeeze. First, Google and Apple banned it from their app stores, which made it nearly impossible to download the app. Then Amazon's Web-hosting services, Amazon Web Services, terminated Parler's account.
Parler filed a lawsuit, arguing that Amazon's crackdown was driven by "political animus." Parler contended that the tech giant was abusing its power and attempting to kneecap a competitor.
In submissions to the court, Parler said Amazon's severing ties threatened Parler with "extinction."
An attorney for Parler wrote that the last six Web hosts the company has approached have refused to work with the site.
Yet the website recently flicked back on as essentially no more than a welcome page. It promised to return soon with the message: "We will not let civil discourse perish!"
Amazon Says Parler Systematically Unwilling To Remove Violent Content
Amazon Says Parler Systematically Unwilling To Remove Violent Content
Judge: Amazon doesn't have to host "abusive, violent content"
In defending against the suit, Amazon considered the matter a simple case of breach of contract. The company flagged dozens of posts advocating violence, which is against its policies, and Parler failed to remove the posts, according to Amazon's attorneys. The posts cited by Amazon include violent threats directed at Twitter's Jack Dorsey, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and leaders in the Democratic Party.
In defending its decision to boot Parler off its Web services, Amazon pointed to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the much-debated 1996 federal law that prevents people from suing Internet companies over what users post.
The law also lets tech companies create and enforce rules over what is allowed and not allowed on their sites.
"That is precisely what AWS did here: removed access to content it considered 'excessively violent' and 'harassing,' " attorneys for Amazon wrote in a submission to the court.
In her opinion, Rothstein agreed with Amazon, ruling that Parler's antitrust claim is "dwindlingly slight" and that the breach of contract argument "failed." She wrote that it was Parler, not Amazon, that violated the terms of the contract.
She pointed to the rioters who stormed the Capitol and documented their violent acts on Parler.
"The Court explicitly rejects any suggestion that the balance of equities or the public interest favors obligating AWS to host the kind of abusive, violent content at issue in this case, particularly in light of the recent riots at the U.S. Capitol," Rothstein wrote. "That event was a tragic reminder that inflammatory rhetoric can — more swiftly and easily than many of us would have hoped — turn a lawful protest into a violent insurrection."
Rothstein did not dismiss the lawsuit outright but rather rejected Parler's request for a preliminary injunction. That said, the decision does not bode well for the future of Parler's legal fight.
Parler is expected to appeal.
In a statement, Jeffrey Wernick, Parler's chief operating officer, said Rothstein not dismissing the case outright was notable. "We remain confident that we will ultimately prevail in the main case," he said.
Meanwhile, Parler is struggling to resuscitate its social network.
David Groesbeck, a lawyer representing Parler, told the court that the company's hope that it could quickly find a new Web-hosting service has not come to fruition, creating a dire situation that Parler's CEO has said could spell the death of the site.
"The notoriety and fallout from the break-up have driven away current and potential business partners, utterly frustrating Parler's pre-termination plans to quickly replace and recover from AWS," Groesbeck wrote in a recent filing.
Parler, which is funded in part by Rebekah Mercer, a major donor of former President Donald Trump, has discussed housing its own servers and supporting its own Web hosting. Trump, too, floated the idea of launching his own social media service after Twitter permanently suspended him.
Disinformation researchers said Amazon's shutdown of Parler eliminated a key gathering place for the sharing and discussion of the election-related conspiracies that Trump has often fanned.
"The reason why we're experiencing this corporate denial of service is because there are really no other levers possible to stop this group of people from reassembling and either trying this again or trying something else that's just as dangerous," said Joan Donovan, an expert on online extremism at Harvard. "It's going to be really important that when they make these decisions, they stick and that they don't walk them back once the heat is off."
A new focus on who controls "the guts of the Web"
To experts who study online speech and infrastructure, the predicament Parler finds itself in reveals just how much control over the Internet is vested in Web hosts, an out-of-sight part of the Web that has the power to decide which sites live or die.
"The guts of the Web that no one ever wants to see, or deal with, or think about" is how Greg Falco, a cyber-risk management researcher at Stanford University, describes these service providers. "It is critical infrastructure for our society, but it's been pushed behind a curtain."
In recent months, the biggest social media companies have drawn brighter lines around the limits of online free speech. And in the wake of the attack on the Capitol, they've taken uncharacteristically aggressive actions against groups and accounts that glorified the violence.
But, as the case of Parler shows, the pressure on social media companies to police the speech on their platforms is shared by Web-hosting companies.
"The question becomes tricky: When do you actually take someone down? It's a really gray territory," Falco said. "The reality is, it comes down to understanding when it reaches some public attention, when there's actually some physical implications."
It is hard to find an example more stark than the insurrection on the Capitol, when droves of rioters turned to Parler and other alternative sites to post videos of vandalism, property damage and other violence, as ProPublica recently documented at length.
"When you have something that's outwardly violent or causes some other crisis or tragedy in the world, that's when Web infrastructure tends to come out of the shadows," said Dave Temkin, a former Netflix executive who oversaw the management of the company's servers.
Web-hosting companies, like social media platforms, address content in their terms of service. Violators can be punished.
Back in 2018, GoDaddy, a major player in site-hosting, kicked Gab offline after it was revealed that the man accused of killing 11 people at a Pittsburgh synagogue had posted anti-Semitic messages to the site. Gab, which removed the suspect's account, came back online with the help of Epik, a company with links to the neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer and theDonald.win, a far-right discussion board created after Reddit banned a forum popular with Trump's most ardent fans. The site recently rebranded as Patriot.win, and Epik supports its domain, the company confirmed.
Evelyn Douek, a lecturer at Harvard Law School, predicts more battles over online speech will erupt between sites that choose a hands-off approach and Web hosts that demand a more aggressive stance. And that troubles her.
"Is that the right place for content moderation to be occurring?" Douek asked. "It's harder to bring accountability to those choices when we don't even know who's making them or why they're being made."
In other words, when a Web host has a problem with content on a client's site, usually these discussions are hashed out between the two parties, far from the public light. And Web hosts, unlike social media platforms, are not used to explaining these decisions publicly.
Another issue, Douek said, is the lack of oversight of Web hosts. She pointed to the 98 pieces of objectionable content Amazon cited in court papers about Parler.
"It sort of made me laugh a little bit," she said. "Has Amazon read the rest of the Internet? Ninety-eight pieces of content or whatever is not that many. I mean, has Amazon read Amazon?"
@neptuneblue,
I thought Mr. Putin was already hosting Parler on Russian servers? What do they need Amazon for?
Marjorie Taylor Greene lies often and without ever correcting herself when her lies are brought to her attention. She is as bad as Trump. Here are some of her most recent lies. How many is she good for in the near future?
To read what she has said and what the truths are, go to this article and read it for yourself. It is truly pitiful what she will done and said.
She can't be trusted now or in the near future regarding anything she says or does. She is beneath contempt and should be censured, given no committee assignments and allowed to bring nothing to the floor for the foreseeable future until see apologizes to the Senate, House of Representation, the President, her constituents and the Country. Then after a reasonable period of time of true contrition, her privileges and duties could be returned!
And, this person is a freshman Senator! Tsk, tsk............
Quote:Fact check: 11 false claims Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene has tweeted in the last month
By Daniel Dale, CNN
Updated 4:04 PM ET, Thu January 21, 2021
Washington (CNN) - A rookie Republican congresswoman from Georgia, Marjorie Taylor Greene, was suspended from Twitter on Sunday for 12 hours after she repeatedly tweeted election misinformation.
Greene has a long history of embracing baseless conspiracy theories. And she has been a serial tweeter of false claims -- about the election, the Capitol insurrection and other subjects -- since she won her seat in November.
Below is a fact check of 11 false claims Greene has tweeted in the last month alone, including three related claims about the integrity of the election. After CNN emailed her congressional office to offer her the opportunity to comment on any of these findings, her communications director, Nick Dyer, had only a brief response, "Here's our comment: 'CNN is fake news.'"
The insurrection timeline
White supremacists and the insurrection
Voter fraud
The integrity of the election
The presidential election in Georgia
The Senate elections in Georgia
The presidential election in Pennsylvania
The First Amendment
Violence in 2020
https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/21/politics/fact-check-marjorie-taylor-greene-twitter-election-capitol/index.html
@revelette3,
It’s a fear of modernity and the changing demographics of America which is why they supported the wall.
@BillW,
On a related topic: Rep. Greene also spread lies regarding two school shootings, claiming they were staged.
Advocates push for Marjorie Taylor Greene’s resignation over report that she spread falsehoods about school shootings
Quote:Two years before she was elected to Congress, Marjorie Taylor Greene hopped on Facebook to respond to a comment falsely claiming that the Parkland, Fla., school shooting was staged, according to screenshots posted by Media Matters for America, a liberal media watchdog group. Instead of rejecting the false claim surrounding the mass shooting that killed 17 people, Greene enthusiastically agreed with the conspiracy theory.“Exactly!” she wrote in response.
Those comments, along with a number of other instances unearthed this week of Greene casting doubt on school shootings, sparked outrage among survivors and family members of those killed in two of the country’s deadliest mass shootings. By Thursday, several advocacy groups, including March For Our Lives-Parkland, Moms Demand Action, and Everytown for Gun Safety, called for Greene (R-Ga.) to give up her seat in the House of Representatives.
“She should resign,” Cameron Kasky, who co-founded the student-led group Never Again MSD after surviving Parkland, told The Washington Post. “She can apologize. I don’t think anybody will accept it.”
Greene’s office did not immediately respond to The Post’s request for comment as of early Friday.
Greene, the first open supporter of the QAnon conspiracy theory to win a seat in Congress, has also continued to repeat former president Donald Trump’s baseless claims of mass election fraud. Earlier this week, Twitter temporarily suspended her account after she posted a clip with false claims about the election.
The Facebook conversations highlighted by Media Matters for America this week came nearly three years after 14 students and three staff members were killed in February 2018 when a former student at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School opened fired on campus.
Three months later, Greene — who was then a right-wing media commentator — posted a news article about the Broward County sheriff’s deputy who failed to confront the shooter, Media Matters for America reported.
In the comments section, someone wrote: “It’s called a pay off to keep his mouth shut since it was a false flag planned shooting.” Greene replied: “Exactly!”
A month later, the watchdog reported, Greene had a similar interaction with another Facebook user after she posted a link to a piece published by the conspiracy theory-spreading site Gateway Pundit about former secretary of state Hillary Clinton.
One commenter called the Parkland shooting “fake,” adding that “none of the School shootings were real or done by the ones who were supposedly arrested for them.” The user spread other conspiracy theories and called the Sandy Hook massacre — in which 20 children and six staff members at an elementary school were fatally shot in 2012 — a “STAGGED [sic] SHOOTING.”
Greene liked the post and replied, “That’s all true.”
In December 2018, Media Matters for America reported, Greene claimed without evidence in a Facebook post that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) viewed school shootings as a convenient means of pushing for stricter gun laws.
“I am told that Nancy Pelosi tells Hillary Clinton several times a month that ‘we need another school shooting’ in order to persuade the public to want strict gun control,” Greene wrote.
The screenshots posted by the watchdog group led to harsh backlash this week.
Fred Guttenberg, the father of 14-year-old Jaime, who was killed in the Parkland shooting, took to Twitter to denounce Greene’s baseless claims.
“Your feelings on gun laws are irrelevant to your claim that Parkland never happened,” Guttenberg said in a tweet to the congresswoman on Thursday. “You are a fraud who must resign. Be prepared to meet me directly in person to explain your conspiracy theory, and soon.”
The Parkland chapter of March For Our Lives called Greene a “coward.”
“The shooting at our school was real. Real kids died and our community is still grieving today. You should be ashamed of yourself and resign from congress,” the organization tweeted. “Conspiracy theorists don’t deserve a seat in the people’s house.”
David Hogg, the activist and co-founder of March For Our Lives, vowed to organize against Greene if she did not apologize for the comments.
“I have one message for @RepMTG,” tweeted Hogg, a Parkland survivor. “Apologize Now or continue to spread the conspiracies and we will be sure to make the next two years of your life not only your last in Congress but a living hell as well.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/01/22/marjorie-taylor-greene-parkland-sandyhook/
@revelette3,
Quote:Why Are Conservatives So Angry Biden Denounced White Supremacy?
The only objection that I have is because Joe Biden is falsely accusing people of being white supremacists.
I wouldn't say that I'm angry though. These false accusations of racism just make progressives look even goofier than usual.
@izzythepush,
We had a similar thing over here which is why Brexit happened. Which is currently a total disaster, food rotting in ports and etrade between the UK and Europe almost at a standstill.
Despite what some would have you believe, it had nothing to do with Islamic terrorism. It was general xenophobia as highlighted in the notorious bigotgate incident with Gordon Brown.
A woman called Gillian Duffy was complaining about all these Eastern Europeans
@izzythepush,
With no sense of irony, and asking where they all came from.
Maybe East Europe.
She summed up the xenophobia, the sense of Europe forcing people on us we didn’t want. It was most noticeable in areas with hardly any previous immigrants. Don’t get me wrong, previous immigrants faced racism, but as ex citizens of the British Empire we were responsible and couldn’t blame anyone else.
(Sorry for cutting off half way, but this device wouldn’t let me write Europeans without an apostrophe, and now it just has. Bloody technology)
@snood,
Quote:What the Dems need to do is 86 the filibuster, so that the can do the initiatives they REALLY NEED TO DO AND WERE ELECTED TO DO with a simple majority in the Senate.
That's not going to be easy — not that you said it was —
as there aren't enough votes.
@hightor,
hightor wrote:
Quote:What the Dems need to do is 86 the filibuster, so that the can do the initiatives they REALLY NEED TO DO AND WERE ELECTED TO DO with a simple majority in the Senate.
That's not going to be easy — not that you said it was —
as there aren't enough votes.
Joe Manchin could **** up a one car funeral.
@snood,
I know why don't he just run as a republican? Why does he remain a democrat? Is is a local thing? Wouldn't that be a thing of the past? I mean he goes farther than just being a conservative democrat. He seems to go out of his way to ruin the democrats whole agenda.
@revelette3,
revelette3 wrote:
I know why don't he just run as a republican? Why does he remain a democrat? Is is a local thing? Wouldn't that be a thing of the past? I mean he goes farther than just being a conservative democrat. He seems to go out of his way to ruin the democrats whole agenda.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Manchin seems to always end up opposing significant Democratic initiatives. I think he likes holding out and being a deciding factor in every decision. Has less to do with his actual beliefs about any of the legislation and more to do with his need to be the focus of attention. If he disappeared down an open manhole I wouldn’t mourn.
Well, they’re voting on Austin for SecDef
@Region Philbis,
The vote was 93-2. Overwhelming and bipartisan.
@snood,
That was quick and painless.
