You clearly never read much about Parler before any of this happened. The founders are most certainly not rioters. They're libertarians who wanted to found a pro-free-speech Twitter.
Just because you disagree with someone doesn't mean they are bad, evil, or wrong.
But, Parler was not pro-free-speech. It was pro right wing speech of any kind, but if your posts were leftists, they would be deleted and accounts banned.
> Parler's entire point was being an alt-right platform
I don’t think this is a fair statement. From past interviews, it’s clear that the CEO of Parler and its founding team intended for it to be politically neutral and a destination for those of all ideologies. They may have attracted those on the political right, but that’s because Twitter is by default a bastion for the political left and naturally those seeking alternatives would have a different lean. But I don’t think that’s the same as the entire point being an alt-right platform.
The person who scraped the site pointed out that users started out shadow-banned, and were only unmuted after it was confirmed their posts fit a certain profile. That’s definitely not neutral.
All your reference shows is all politically-neutral anti-SPAM categories[1]. Compare this with Twitter’s internal moderation tool[2] and their granular suppression capabilities which appear deliberately prone to abuse.
I don’t think this particular conjecture is that sensational and backs up what Amazon has already claimed. This list of moderators overwhelmingly are Republicans/conservatives and some of them make concerning assertions in their bios.
I said it’s conjecture and you don’t disagree. I’ll leave it to you how sensational it is. I have biases but I would have no problem in moderating without them as above else I believe in free speech, so this argument is not very convincing, personally. You might be right, though, I’ve never used Parler, so IDK. But evidence is evidence and that Twitter statement was dishonest.
Every medium wants to reach as many people as possible. So they limit the visibility of what they don't like, but they don't completely get rid of people they don't like since they would no longer reach those groups.
Open basically any media and you'll see three categories:
(1) Opinion pieces.
(2) Attempts at appearing neutral by allowing opposing views, but always together with a commentary provided either by themselves or someone else to clearly provide objections.
(3) Safe easily sharable info. Like cute / funny pictures you can send to your friends which will get people into the site.
Fair enough. But is there any evidence to this? From my point of view, Twitter allows people like Steven Crowder, JK Rowling and Radical Feminists to use their platform to spread hate towards trans people, yet if I go there now and make a post with the word TERF in it I'll be suspended immediately.
Why is that a platform considered biased towards left thinking? Because it put warnings under probably false claims by far right presidents? The fact that it's only happened to Trump and Bolsonaro says more about right wing politics than about Twitter itself.
What Parler was, was bad for business. It's not a good look for AWS to be hosting websites with violent content linked to the Capitol insurrection, and apparently doing nothing about it. So they pulled the plug.
The elephant in the room is Facebook. There's lots of evidence they were the most directly responsible [1]. Parler wasn't bad for business but scapegoating it was good PR.
Facebook quite possibly was more responsible because they're more popular. But they also appear to be a actively fighting the misinformation that these groups spread and thrive on.
Whereas Parler is the opposite: they practically celebrate how little they care about undermining democracy with misinformation.
Actually FB let it fester and didn’t do anything about it until recently. Sure, Parler exists to provide this needed freedom of expression to extremists and does not represent what it is but in terms of impact, FB has had a lot more and did nothing about it
Only bad for business because of political dealings. The AWS name was not associated with Parler.
In my view, the more likely actual reason for the cancelling of Parler, as well as for their seemingly excessive hardware requirements, is that Parler wants a shot at competing with Twitter for real, and has convinced their investors that is possible. The latest chaos must be one of the best free marketing anybody in their line of business could hope for.
If realDonaldTrump moves to Parler, and some popular republicans already have, that would potentially bring in a floodwave of new users, and risking that kind of business opportunity by having underpowered servers would be professional malpractice.
Parler is also likely to face months-long DDOS attacks.
The AWS name wasn't associated with Parler and the Capitol insurrection, but it likely would have been. This is all about getting ahead of the story and limiting any potential brand damage.
It's similar to when Cloudflare booted 8chan, after the latter was linked to the white nationalist terrorist attacks in Christchurch and El Paso.
I don't understand the rationale for your view. Why would slapping down a potential Twitter competitor be any concern of AWS?
Their stated aim was to forcibly overturn the results of a free and fair election, so that their leader, who lost, could remain in power.
In what universe is that not an insurrection?
It's not like they just protested outside and maybe broke a few windows with rocks or something. They actually broke through the police defense, broke into the building, and went looking for legislators, who had to be evacuated.
I'm sure one or two idiots out of thousands of people had (or at least expressed) bad intentions. What we're talking about here is the goals of the group.
What other intention did they have in pushing up the steps of the capitol and then inside? It’s not like two idiots did that. They were all attending a “Stop the Steal” rally and were told that their country was being stolen from them. They were told Pence must comply.
Their goal was to stop the counting of the electoral college votes and cause havoc. They were trying to literally subvert the federal government and our collective voting system.
> What other intention did they have in pushing up the steps of the capitol and then inside?
They very obviously didn't have a plan and were just seeing how far they could get. You are imputing too much direction and intelligence to these people.
> They were trying to literally subvert the federal government and our collective voting system.
The capitol doesn't work like a round of Capture the Flag in Halo; just standing there for a few minutes doesn't give you political power. Even the protestors were smart enough to comprehend this.
So you're supposing they were just trying to see how far they could get into the Capitol for what purpose? Fun? Lore? A game?
Nobody else is contending that the Capital is a "round" of capture the flag. You just brought that up for some bizarre reason. The timing of this directly lines up with when they were working to count the electoral college votes. More than a few people were violent toward the cops, and nobody has any reason to believe that they wouldn't have killed some Democratic congresspeople or Pence if they had been able to find them. At least one person did kill a cop and a dozen other cops were injured.
> There's zero evidence that they intended to do anything to legislators.
You mean other than:
(1) Many of them stating their imminent or thwarted intent to do so, either by chants, in interviews, in electronic messages, or otherwise;
(2) Them bringing weapons and restraints with which to do things to legislators;
(3) Them becoming increasingly agitated and violent at the prospects of targets of violence escaping, as occurred when people were evacuated from the Speakers Lobby shortly before the breakthrough where Ashli Babbitt was shot.
> This is the only actual violence that happened and it was an overreaction by the police.
Not true. The mob physically attacked the Capitol police, repeatedly, with a variety of weapons. One of the policemen, who was struck in the head by a rioter wielding a fire extinguisher, later died from his injuries.
> The mob physically attacked the Capitol police, repeatedly, with a variety of weapons.
Can you be more specific than "a variety of weapons"? Almost all interactions with the police seemed peaceful, bordering on friendly, barring the one who was hit on the head.
That is quite the hypothetical. Given that the internet is a worldwide phenomenon, it seems incredibly unlikely that all server companies and internet service providers would refuse their business.
In particular, the 'bulletproof hosting' market is still going strong. For example, just look at The Pirate Bay, who have managed to stay online and operational despite years of attempts by powerful corporations and nation states to take it down.
>Given that the internet is a worldwide phenomenon, it seems incredibly unlikely that all server companies and internet service providers would refuse their business.
I can agree that getting up and running is, probably, always possible. But that is no consolation if you're a business that can arbitrarily be shut down on a whim, perhaps without even being given a warning. The financial circumstances might make restarting or moving around untenable.
>In particular, the 'bulletproof hosting' market is still going strong.
Yes, and if there's anything good to say about this mess, it's that this particular kind of service is likely to grow.
Yes but considering the business Parler are in, i.e. publishing the sort of controversial content that gets its users banned on more mainstream social media sites, they would have been wise to have a disaster recovery plan for hosting that covered this possibility.
>they would have been wise to have a disaster recovery plan for hosting that covered this possibility.
I agree, and don't feel upset about their particular circumstances.
However, as others have noted, Twitter (moving to AWS) has vastly more controversial content. What are the guidelines as far as what content is tolerable and/or needs to been moderated, and at what rate of "urgency", for them versus Parler? These things aren't spelled out. How can a small business comply?
I think the general guideline is, don't provide your hosting provider with incentives to enforce their terms of service against you, to the point where you're denied any further business from them.
It's not, this has happened many times previously.
Including against similarly far-right sites, e.g. Stormfront, Gab, 8kun/8chan, etc. All of which are still operational, after changing hosting providers.
How is it an antitrust case? Amazon doesn't have a monopoly on hosting internet services. And there is no oligopoly for this line of business, there are many thousands of suitable providers worldwide.
It would be different if, say, CenturyLink were blocking content across their transit infrastructure. That would be more like your railroad analogy.
Antitrust legislation isn't built around 100 % monopoly, but rather dominant force and cartel-like behavior, especially if they act to suppress growth of potential competitors. This is the core of antitrust jurisprudence: markets only work in presence of vigorous competition, but big incumbents are highly motivated to obtain so much influence that significant competition does not have a real chance to grow and threaten them.
There is a longish recent staff report on the Web of the Congress regarding behavior of Amazon, Apple, Google and Facebook (almost 500 pages) [0]. I actually read most of it. These platforms have already engaged in a lot of stuff that is anti-competitive. And the latest purge of Parler is, among other effects, also a suppression of a potential competitor.
Of course, the tech giants say that they weren't officially motivated by a desire to suppress a competitor, but they acted against potentially competing firms so many times already that one should be wary about their explanations.
Thanks for clarifying your position, but I still don't quite see how this applies to Parler in terms of their decision to host upon AWS. There are many thousands of other hosting companies worldwide, they didn't have to use one of the big three IaaS providers.
It seems more like poor planning on their part: over-reliance on specific services of a single provider, and no disaster recovery plan for if this is made unavailable. Particularly considering the business they're in - publishing controversial content that gets its users banned on more mainstream social media sites. They would have been wise to have a backup plan for hosting.
On the other hand, if you were also passing reference to the app store duopoly (as the report mentions this), I agree with you on that. At least on Android a banned app can be fairly easily side-loaded; iOS users are entirely subject to Apple's whims on what their device is permitted to run.
I could definitely have formulated my opinion better...
If Amazon acted alone, I do not think that there would be an antitrust case. But given that Amazon acted together with the app store duopoly, in what appears to be a coordinated action with the same goal, I think the antitrust case applies. If two very dominant players make a pact with a third not-so-dominant player to squeeze somebody a bit more, it only makes their anti-competitive behavior harsher.
BTW, I believe that Parler really could have prepared better. It is obvious that they did not have a good plan B.
Why do you assume that there was necessarily coordination? In my opinion it's likely everyone who is dropping Parler came to their verdict independently.
It is certainly possible that they all acted independently, but given how many cases of anti-competitive behavior on their part have been documented in the linked report of the Congress - these companies are not completely honest.
Mikhail Gorbachev used to say "Trust, but verify." I would like to see some verification in this case.
The threshold is if the management at Amazon etc. feel that it would generate too much bad publicity and/or potential legal liability for them to provide service to an organization mired in such controversy.
Indeed, and I think it's because Parler is best known for hosting violent, far-right content, that is linked to the recent insurrection at the Capitol Building. Whereas the other services you cite are much more generic in their clientele.
So based on this, Amazon made a business decision to deny service to Parler, due to the adverse publicity (and perhaps, potential legal liability) generated for them by hosting this content.
or the fact that nicolas maduro - a man already convicted of crimes against humanity by the UN - still has an account and has gone uncensored. how anyone here defends such blatant hypocrisy is beyond me
I don't think "convicted of crimes against humanity by the UN" violates Twitter's ToS, and I'm assuming he didn't use Twitter to commit any of the alleged crimes, so this is a pretty bad faith, whataboutism, complete non-sense, etc.. By this logic you could ban both Bush and Obama, too.
Please remind me when Nicolas Maduro led an armed mob into the US Capitol.
We judge threats not only on their intent, but on their success in executing that intent. On that measure, Parler is much more dangerous than Maduro, Putin, or the Ayatollah.
it's clear that selective enforcement occurs, especially on Twitter. while i'm sure there are examples of violence being incited on Parler, I can find just as many examples (if not more) on Twitter.
Twitter let Trump spew his garbage right up until the point that it led to an armed insurrection.
So far, Parler and its associates have come a lot closer to dismantling American democracy than Iran ever has. That's why they get taken more seriously.
As Twitter said, it's not just the content, but the context as well. When Iranian soldiers invade the US Capitol, I'm sure they'll face a Twitter ban as well.
The mob nearly succeeded in capturing, kidnapping, or killing democratically-elected members of Congress. Or, as they were chanting, in hanging the vice president. I see no reason not to take them seriously.
The leadership in Iran, in contrast, has not gotten any closer to its goal of destroying Israel since the Revolution.
The tweet says: "#Israel is a malignant cancerous tumor in the West Asian region that has to be removed and eradicated: it is possible and it will happen."
Do you think that is not as bad as what Trump has said?
They're not wrong that it's different, Israel and Jews are two different things. You can be against Israel without being and antisemite, though I wouldn't guess that's the case here.
They're not wrong that it's different, Israel and Jews are two different things. You can be against Israel without being an antisemite, though I wouldn't guess that's the case here.
Israel is a country, Jews are a race. You can be for the replacement of Israel with a more inclusive nation-state without calling for a Jewish genocide.
Now you and I both know the Ayatollah believes in a Jewish genocide, but this particular tweet isn’t proof or evidence of it.
You have to understand things in context though. Trump never said "storm the US capitol". Twitter's official reason for banning him was for glorifying violence by tweeting that “The 75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me, AMERICA FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE long into the future. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!” and that he wouldn't be going to the inauguration.
If you can twist that into supporting the rioters and calling for violence at the inauguration, I don't see how you can't see calling for the destruction of Israel could cause people to be anti-Semitic.
If Trump tweeted that Mexico was cancerous tumor on America that has to be removed and eradicated, it is possible, and it will happen, do you think Twitter be cool with that? What if he had previously endorsed the genocide of all Mexican people? What if Americans had commonly been committing terrorist attacks against Mexicans?
Then maybe AWS should just come out and say "We disabled our services for Parler because it's very unpopular and we don't want to be associated with it."
They pretty much already did. In corporate PR terms, "it contravened our Terms of Service" is essentially synonymous with "we don't want to be associated with it".
"parler is just not worth the aggravation" - they are likely to be a minuscule revenue source that requires constant monitoring to make sure we not facing any liability, as well as potentially pissing off our existing clients. Therefore, its in our best interests just not to bother with them.
Anyone that thinks corporations care one way or another about anything except their bottom lines, has a much higher view of corporations then I do.
I mean when MC & Visa decided pornhub was a potential liability, they cut them off. When companies decide Trump or Parler are a liability - they do the same - they cut them off. That's just capitalism. No master except the almighty dollar.
but if they were at least honest about it, maybe we could stop re-hashing this everyday...
As a counterexample: The Pirate Bay have successfully dealt with this sort of thing for many years, and they were subject to much harsher and more sustained censorship. Including legal attacks by various nation states.
Is it really totalitarianism in this case? Or, just some private companies inconveniencing people by choosing not to do business with them?
While I applaud Pirate Bay for the technological ingenuity that is not an counter example in anyway
The Pirate Bay is more or less a link register today after having been pushed to the point where they can not even sustain hosting torrent files, they can only host mag links.
This is far cry from running an actual platform or business on the internet.
How is it not a counterexample? TPB has user registration, submissions and comments, and a search function. Conceptually, this isn't too different to the function of Parler.
Also, the introduction of magnet links (or more generally, the DHT which those rely on) was a broadly positive move for the BitTorrent community, reducing reliance on centralized tracker servers.
Trump to this day has an approval rate of around 40%. That is a pretty large “periphery”. You can not just seperate him from the Republican party. They tried and failed.
It'll certainly be interesting to see what happens to the Republican party over the next few years, given that they've ended up tying themselves so strongly to Trump's cult of personality.
> There was always a contingent of "Never Trumpers". Politicians are fickle.
Trump isn't really a Republican, it's just that on some key issues, his position aligns better with the Republican party. The majority of the Republican party was openly anti-Trump in the beginning, then later turned around due to his massive public support.
That hasn't really changed, his approval is as stable as ever. The only people buying into the "failed coup" narrative are the ones that never supported him to begin with. Dropping Trump, as much as the party might want to, is not a recipe for success. Strategically, dividing the Republican party will be the prime objective of Democrats.
Personally I think or rather hope this is a defining moment for both Democrat and Republicans,
It will really come down to what the Democrats do with their current turn in power, The republican party is clearly fractured, if the Democrats attempt to ram through sweeping social and economic changes that appeal to their most authoritarian left base then it will fracture the Democrat party as well
This could be, for the first time since the Wig Party collapsed, that we see an opening for an actual 3rd party to emerge
Except Twitter is for Republicans too. And many of them like Bill Kristol turned against Trump because of his behavior. Many that still support Trump have managed to stay on Twitter because they act responsibly.
The problem with Parker and Gab is that they are only for the problem users. In fact, in an interview with Kara Swisher the CEO said that they have panels of volunteers that judge whether a post should be removed. The blind leading the blind.
Bill Kristol is an Authoritarian, Pro-War, corporatist Republican that does not share much in way of ideology with many social conservatives in the Political party.
Bill Kristol is the type of Republican that turned me away from the Republican party
Bill Kristol is closer in political alignment with the Authoritarian Left, than he is with the Libertarian right which is why he is allowed to stay on Twitter.
"Antifa riots" is a somewhat vague descriptor, but may well be yes, depending on which incident or incidents you're referring to.
Are you sure you haven't heard anyone describe anti-fascist actions as terrorism? I believe Trump himself said as much, several times last year, to wide news coverage.
The "ANTIFA" riots? Can you cite a source for this claim that the black lives matters protests were propagated in any sort of widespread, organized concerted effort by "ANTIFA"? I hear this claim often from Trump supporters but as far as I can tell, they either heard it on talk radio or Fox News. Considering Fox News' coverage of Trump prior to the election, I don't exactly consider them a reliable source. If you could provide a single source for these claims I think that would help your case tremendously.
Otherwise (and I'm so sorry if this sounds condescending), have you considered reflecting on the trustworthiness of the news you tend to digest? I think we can all agree that it's time for the GOP to reflect. Many of them were willing to throw away their principles by repeating Trump's lies that the election was unfair or stolen. Have you not yet arrived at this conclusion finally?
Nobody said anything about BLM. That was just you.
Instead the previous poster was likely refering to the violence and death that happened, at places like the Seattle Cap hill autonomous zone.
Such events included many self identified anarchists. And there absolutely were shootings attacks on a government building during those anarchist riots.
Nothing to do with BLM. Instead, people are referring to the actions taken by anarchists.
> Nobody said anything about BLM. That was just you.
Oh, okay. I had thought I had seen Donald Trump try several times during his speeches to conflate ANTIFA with the BLM movement in order to discredit BLM. Considering we know that a certain number of Trump's base will follow him all the way to treason, I hope you can understand why I might believe they were tricked into thinking this was true.
A reputable source would still be appreciated though. Thanks.
Oh and Biden won less counties than Hillary, which was already low for her (hence her loss). Biden under performed in every state except for 5 key swing states and even then it was only a "win" because a never before seen amount of mail in ballots were used. Perhaps they were fake, or perhaps people that would never set foot in a voting place were fine with circling "biden" on a mail in ballot and dropping it back in the mail box. Still against state law either way.
Oh and very few ballots were contested due to signature mismatches. Funny because Obama won his senate seat in the 90's by having a team canvas all of his competitors primary ballots and had them whittled down until he was the only one running for the office that year.
I'm sorry you're incapable of seeing that this is factually incorrect. I hope that you're able to reflect on this in the next few years as Donald Trump's legacy will be similar to that of Nixon, if not worse. And deservedly so. I don't believe any further conversation will be in the spirit of Hacker News' rules. I'm sorry your leader tricked so many of you and then immediately threw you all under the bus.
At moderation, I realize I've gotten to a point that you may consider "flame bait" and I'll admit, my tensions are high due to the reprehensible nature of many of these comments and how sad I am for my country. I'm happy to have my comment removed of it doesn't follow the guidelines.
There will be no reflection of "Donald Trump's legacy" that is positive for the left. I do not watch CNN or fox news, or get my "news" from twitter. For the last 5 years, I've mostly kept in touch with reality through youtube. There were tons of independent journalists that I followed. Some that were covering the election had paid subscriptions to pollster data and software. They could drill down into county level and precinct level data and it was shocking to see vote totals that exceeded the population of the entire precinct! You could go back historically and see every election 2016,2012, etc and see the turnout rates were always 50-70%. It was these precincts that flipped the entire state from red to blue. I thought surely this would be going into audit and court territory and did not bother to save the data or videos as I figured "all would come into the light".
Then youtube banned all these channels. They were not even republican! They were banned for comparing voter turn out numbers with data they paid money to access! Fast forward to this last week. I'm watching another youtube journalist interviewing people at the Jan 6th protest. She was mostly talking with older people, asking what made them show up, etc. There was music, food, and people just generally hanging out. I go back to work for the rest of the day and ignored the news cycle only to get a notification of her posting another video later in the evening about how she just found out about the siege on the capitol. She was there and knew nothing about until getting back to the hotel! And then the entire left wing media labels the event as terrorists and white supremacists. Her next video the next day was about her now being on a no fly list and couldn't get on a plane. Now her entire channel is deleted and I have no idea what happened to her! All this for interviewing grandmas at a protest!
My entire way of getting news for the last 5 years is now non-existent. And you tell me that I am supposed to "reflect" on this? That somehow because I don't drink everything that CNN makes up means I need to be removed from society? That I should only get my news from one "official" source?
I try to engage with people on the left, and it's always "show me the proof!". I had great proof, and numbers, but the left removed it all and now I have nothing and am told the BLM protests were so much more honorable than the capitol protest when all of the videos on youtube of people organizing through facebook and telegram groups with slogans of "good cops are dead cops" are now also deleted and people act like the protests never happened. We do not have a state run media in america, but it is clear that we have a media run state and every one on the left is the very definition of 'Koristne Budale'. All the way to the point of voting for a man who the KKK applauded in the 60's for his pro segregation policies. Now he is somehow the face of "anti racism" and "defund the police" when in the 90's he pushed for the death penalty for repeat drug offenders.
Why don't you try a thought process? How would you feel if it was herds of trump supporters marching through cities lighting everything on fire for 6 months while everyone talked about how peaceful they where? So you think, "We'll show them come Nov 4th". And on Nov 4th, Biden takes an immediate lead only to loose in the middle of the night because Trump's "mail in ballots just arrived" and there's no need to check signatures. And then it bounces around the courts for nearly two months, none of them speaking on the matter at hand, but instead claiming that somehow it is not the court's problem to solve. So you attend a protest at the capitol only to be labeled as a terrorist because some really fringe people were all the media focused on. You'd be absolutely loosing your mind. If you think it feels bad being on the left, trying being on the right!
Oh and Trump is not my leader. It took him two weeks before he started talking about the numbers I had on the 5th. He in many cases this year has been late to the game. Our only hope is extreme voter reform, but the democrats love a loose ballot. They do not orchestrate fraud, they only make sure the pool stays too muddy to clean.
We are about to have 80 million americans that will never see Biden or the DNC as legit. It will be like fighting over Jefferson Davis all over again.
I hope you reflect deeply. I've been an agnostic, a leftist, a libertarian. Telling me to get enlightened and go back ain't happening.
Sorry, but I don't have a response for you that is in the spirit of this site's rules. Namely, that conversation should be interesting. Have a nice day.
>Oh and Biden won less counties than Hillary, which was already low for her (hence her loss).
why is this relevant? electoral college votes (and population, if you care about the popular vote) isn't distributed by counties.
>Biden under performed in every state except for 5 key swing states
Can you define "underperformed"?
>Perhaps they were fake, or perhaps people that would never set foot in a voting place were fine with circling "biden" on a mail in ballot and dropping it back in the mail box. Still against state law either way.
If you're going to go with the election fraud claim, at least provide evidence rather than just beating around the bush. Also, please cite how "people that would never set foot in a voting place were fine with circling "biden" on a mail in ballot and dropping it back in the mail box" is against state law.
>Oh and very few ballots were contested due to signature mismatches. Funny because Obama won his senate seat in the 90's by having a team canvas all of his competitors primary ballots and had them whittled down until he was the only one running for the office that year.
How is this relevant? Is there a process for invaliding signatures that the republicans haven't invoked? Do democrat voters' signatures get invalidated at a higher rate than republicans? Is the "normal" invalidation rate high enough to surpass biden's lead in the key states?
Amazon aren't the only provider of hosting services, even if they are one of the largest. It's entirely doable to shift providers, even in the face of censorship - The Pirate Bay is one long-running example of this.
I'm not sure how you missed the point by that much. Infrastructure bans are a thing now. You can't produce an app to compete with Twitter and Facebook if you don't have access to scalable infrastructure. Moving to a different host to get canceled there isn't a solution.
Seems rather excessive for a mid-tier social networking website.