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How to kill an app with one click

Good morning! This Monday, Amazon crushed Parler and raised tricky questions about the internet, Black users are making Clubhouse better and how Trump's tweets get archived.
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If Twitter (and Facebook and Snap and Shopify and Stripe and Campaign Monitor and Twitch and I'm sure I'm forgetting some) banning Trump was the nuclear option, then I'd call what AWS did to Parler the Thanos Option: snapping its fingers and causing instant and total obliteration.
What Amazon did here feels different from Twitter banning an account or even Apple banning an app, and it raises interesting questions about how the internet should work and who should police it.
This is another lesson in why rules are so important: They give you both power and cover to run your business the way you want. Apple, Google and Amazon all said they'd warned Parler before about content moderation.
There are no easy answers to any of this. But here's A Prediction: This is going to make a lot of companies start to think about how to be more self-reliant, subject to the whims and politics of AWS servers and Facebook APIs.
Not every company needs to worry about getting kicked off of AWS, obviously — just, you know, don't run a platform on which people openly discuss their plans for violent insurrection — but it's at least a little eye-opening how easily AWS can turn on you.
Anna Kramer writes: Poof. The second Twitter banned Trump's personal account, his countless Tweets vanished, too. Sure, some people had the presence of mind to independently archive them all (this site is pretty thorough, and searchable!), but it raised a lot of urgent questions about how — and if — his tweets will be kept safe for the historical record.
Eventually, all of those Tweets will be permanently and publicly accessible, though the archives team didn't provide a date. Not to worry, future historians: You'll all be cursed with more to work with than you could possibly imagine.
What the internet really needs isn't more deplatforming but more transparency, Mozilla's Mitchell Baker said:
Black users are making Clubhouse a more creative, fun place, and Black & Brown Founders' Aniyia Williams said that's no surprise:
The pipeline argument against diversity has to end, said Vue.ai's Ashwini Asokan:
Facebook's Will Cathcart tried to explain the whole WhatsApp privacy change, and said it's good that privacy is finally a feature people care about:
For Raj Hazra, who is senior vice president of corporate strategy and communications at Micron, there has never been a more thrilling time than this golden age of data. In this interview, Hazra describes how "we are now at the doorstep of taking things that we thought were science fiction and making them real, and it's only going to be exponentially faster going forward". Read more from Micron's Raj Hazra.
It's CES 2021! Because not enough is happening in the tech world right now. This year's show is all virtual, and given *gestures broadly* everything happening right now, from politics to the pandemic, the show is likely to play host to a lot of conversations about what tech means in the world going forward. We also have a bunch of CES-related stuff coming this week, some of it right here in Source Code. So stay tuned.
San Francisco police are preparing for a pro-Trump protest at Twitter HQ today. Not that many employees are actually at the Market Street building these days.
Samsung has an event on Thursday, where it's likely going to announce the Galaxy S21. I say "likely," but you can already preorder the thing, so we can pretty safely assume.
It's either the deal of the century or daylight robbery, depending on how you feel about crypto: The owner of two New York bars, Scruffy Duffy's and Hellcat Annie's, will sell them both for 25 Bitcoins or 800 Ether. (As I write this, that's a little less than a million bucks, and Bitcoin's a slightly better deal.) If you do buy them, I recommend charging Bitcoin for booze, too. You might get rich again pretty fast.
For Raj Hazra, who is senior vice president of corporate strategy and communications at Micron, there has never been a more thrilling time than this golden age of data. In this interview, Hazra describes how "we are now at the doorstep of taking things that we thought were science fiction and making them real, and it's only going to be exponentially faster going forward". Read more from Micron's Raj Hazra.
Today's Source Code was written by David Pierce, with help from Anna Kramer and Shakeel Hashim. Thoughts, questions, tips? Send them to david@protocol.com, or our tips line, tips@protocol.com. Enjoy your day; see you tomorrow.
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