We begin today with a look at the recent Parler shut down and what it means to you as a business owner. Politics aside, the recent actions of multiple private technology providers to decide to no longer do business with a company should have you evaluating your technology stack as well. For the vast majority of us, we will never be in the same boat as Parler found themselves in, but precedent has been set and now it should be included in your business continuity plans.
It could be your social media business marketing presence or it could be your platform as a whole, but section 230 of the U.S. code was developed to promote the continued development of the internet actually protects providers and users from any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively, violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected.
So Section 230 actually protects and allows any provider to take action to restrict access or access to posts. The slippery slope is the definition of what is considered to be in violation is ever changing and is open ended, so pending the audience your content today may be appropriate, but tomorrow it may not.
At the end of the day, the data center hosts like Amazon AWS, the app store owners like Apple or Google, or even the company hosting your website are defined as private businesses and depending on your contracted terms ask you to remove your data.
This is where it’s important to understand the contract, depending on what you are hosting online knowing and understanding the terms of cancelation of service and how long you would have to locate a new provider and move your data.
So inside your business continuity plans, you should add a section and include the contracted information with your web service providers, and what the ramifications would be if a service went offline.
It also appears that right before the site was taken offline the site, roughly 70 TB of data including messages, videos, group members and administrative accounts, posts, and even deleted posts were leaked. This data might prove valuable to law enforcement since many who participated in the recent protests at the U.S. capitol building used the social platform.
