Apple CEO Tim Cook, an Alabama native with a lifelong interest in civil rights, joins condemnations of Georgia's new voting law. From a report: "The right to vote is fundamental in a democracy. American history is the story of expanding the right to vote to all citizens, and Black people, in particular, have had to march, struggle and even give their lives for more than a century to defend that right."

"Apple believes that, thanks in part to the power of technology, it ought to be easier than ever for every eligible citizen to exercise their right to vote," Cook continues. "We support efforts to ensure that our democracy's future is more hopeful and inclusive than its past." The floodgates are open, as Axios' Courtenay Brown wrote on Wednesday. Almost a week after a bill that curbs voting access in Georgia became law -- and nearly one month after it passed the state's House -- a slew of corporations have come out against voter suppression.

The Hill reports that Amazon engaged in "a heated Twitter exchange" with U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren "after the lawmaker claimed that it and other large corporations 'exploit loopholes and tax havens to pay close to nothing in taxes.'" The exchange began after Warren (Democrat - Massachusetts) tweeted a clip from Thursday's Senate Finance Committee hearing, in which she accused Amazon and other companies of "manipulating the tax code to avoid paying their fair share."

Hours later, the Amazon News Twitter account responded with, "You make the tax laws @SenWarren; we just follow them."

"If you don't like the laws you've created, by all means, change them," Amazon tweeted, adding that the tech giant "has paid billions of dollars in corporate taxes over the past few years alone...." The company added that since 2010, it has invested $350 billion in the U.S. economy and in 2020, added 400,000 new jobs across the country...

Warren later Thursday evening hit back at Amazon, tweeting, "I didn't write the loopholes you exploit... your armies of lawyers and lobbyists did."

"But you bet I'll fight to make you pay your fair share," she continued. "And fight your union-busting. And fight to break up Big Tech so you're not powerful enough to heckle senators with snotty tweets."
UPDATE: Bernie Sanders was recently called out on Twitter by the retail chief of Amazon. "I often say we are the Bernie Sanders of employers, but that's not quite right because we actually deliver a progressive workplace."

A recent article in Recode suggests the tweets may have been encouraged by Jeff Bezos: Amazon has long been at odds with Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren over their criticisms of the company's labor and business practices. But the discord reached a new height last week when Amazon aggressively went after both on Twitter in an unusual attack for a large corporation. With each new snarky tweet from an Amazon executive or the company's official Twitter account, insiders and observers alike asked a version of the same question: "What the hell is going on?"

Turns out that Amazon leaders were following a broad mandate from the very top of the company: Fight back.

Recode has learned that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos expressed dissatisfaction in recent weeks that company officials weren't more aggressive in how they pushed back against criticisms of the company that he and other leaders deem inaccurate or misleading. What followed was a series of snarky and aggressive tweets that ended up fueling their own media cycles.

The timing was likely not coincidental. Bezos and other Amazon leaders are on edge as the company is facing the largest union election in its history at its Bessemer, Alabama warehouse.

The powerful Democrat overseeing antitrust legislation wants to hit Big Tech with the legislative equivalent of a swarm of drones rather than a single, hulking battleship that would be simpler to defeat. From a report: In an interview with Axios on Sunday, Rep. David Cicilline (D-R.I.) said he didn't want to give the major technology companies and their armies of lobbyists the easy target of a massive antitrust bill. Instead, in his role running the House Judiciary Committee's antitrust panel, he plans to craft a series of smaller bills -- perhaps 10 or more -- that will be ready in May.

The way Cicilline sees it, this small-target strategy achieves two goals: He has a better chance of finding common ground between Democrats and Republicans on more narrowly targeted issues. And he makes it harder for Amazon, Facebook, Apple and Google to mobilize quickly against reforms they don't like. "If you look at the way these technology companies have staffed up with their lobbying and the money they're investing in Washington, it's designed ... to prevent any changes to the current ecosystem that benefits them enormously," Cicilline told Axios. "They have literally billions and billions and billions of reasons to try to protect the current system because it produces ... profits not seen on planet Earth." Recognizing this reality, Cicilline said his intention is to use this range of bills to advance all the recommendations in his panel's 450-page investigation into competition in the digital marketplace.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: US President Joe Biden is reportedly planning to nominate antitrust scholar Lina Khan to the Federal Trade Commission, a move that would indicate his administration is open to aggressive antitrust regulation not only generally but specifically against Amazon and other Big Tech firms. At present, Khan is an associate law professor at Columbia Law School. Khan vaulted directly to antitrust superstardom in 2017 while she was still a law student, when she published her blockbuster paper "Amazon's Antitrust Paradox" in the Yale Law Journal.

In "Amazon's Antitrust Paradox," Khan argued that using consumer pricing as the key benchmark for determining whether a company or a merger is anticompetitive is not sufficient and that Amazon's size and scale make it anticompetitive. "Specifically," she wrote in the abstract, "current doctrine underappreciates the risk of predatory pricing and how integration across distinct business lines may prove anticompetitive." Her work made an enormous splash. FTC Commissioner Rohit Chopra, a Democrat, sought her as an advisor in 2018, when the commission was kicking off an antitrust enforcement review. "It's rare to come across a legal prodigy like Lina Khan," Chopra told The New York Times in 2018. "Nothing about her career is typical. You don't see many law students publish groundbreaking legal research, or research that had such a deep impact so quickly." Critics, on the other hand, dubbed her theories "hipster antitrust."

During 2019 and 2020, Khan served as one of the House subcommittee staffers who compiled a massive, blockbuster report digging into the antitrust implications of Big Tech. After 16 months of hearings, research, and analysis, the committee determined last fall that Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google were all in some way breaking competition law and needed to be reined in. The news comes only a few days after the Biden administration announced it was bringing on Tim Wu as special advisor on technology and competition policy. Wu is one of the most outspoken critics of Big Tech, arguing in his most recent book, 2018's The Curse of Bigness, that unchecked market concentration was leading to a new Gilded Age and all the problems that come with it.

India's government has threatened to jail employees of Facebook, its WhatsApp unit and Twitter as it seeks to quash political protests and gain far-reaching powers over discourse on foreign-owned tech platforms, WSJ reported Friday, citing people familiar with the warnings. From the report: The warnings are in direct response to the tech companies' reluctance to comply with data and takedown requests from the government related to protests by Indian farmers that have made international headlines, the people say. At least some of the written warnings cite specific, India-based employees at risk of arrest if the companies don't comply, according to two of the people. The threats mark an escalation of India's efforts to pressure U.S. tech companies at a moment when those companies are looking to the world's second-most-populous nation for growth in the coming years. Some of the government's requests for data involve WhatsApp, which is hugely popular in India and promises users encrypted communication, unable to be read by outside parties.

Facebook will lift its ban on political ads on Thursday, ending a self-imposed prohibition that began immediately after the November 2020 general election and remained active for months. Politico reports: Facebook informed top political advertisers of its decision by phone and email on Wednesday, according to sources with knowledge of the announcement. The social media giant banned political and social issue-related ads in early November in an effort to curb misinformation around the general election. But the pause on political ads extended deep into the first months of the Biden administration, only partially lifted ahead of the Georgia Senate runoffs in early January.

Facebook will now return political ads to its platform, one of the largest and most cost-effective ways for campaigns to reach voters and potential supporters. Digital strategists in both parties were sharply critical of Facebook's decision to cut off access to voters for the last several months, upending off-year campaign strategies. In an email sent to clients on Wednesday, Facebook representatives said, "while we are lifting the ad pause, our work is not over."

"For the past several years, we invested heavily to fight misinformation, voter suppression and election interference, and remain committed to removing and reducing this type of content while connecting people with reliable information across our apps," the email continued, signed by two Facebook partners. "As a result, we plan to use the coming months to take a closer look at how these ads work on our service to see where further changes may be merited."

Former lobbyist/political advisor Joel Kaplan joined Facebook in 2011 to lead its Washington D.C. outreach, reports BuzzFeed news.

But some employees said they were very unhappy with decisions made by both Kaplan and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg: In April 2019, Facebook was preparing to ban one of the internet's most notorious spreaders of misinformation and hate, Infowars founder Alex Jones. Then CEO Mark Zuckerberg personally intervened... [H]e overruled his own internal experts and opened a gaping loophole: Facebook would permanently ban Jones and his company — but would not touch posts of praise and support for them from other Facebook users. This meant that Jones' legions of followers could continue to share his lies across the world's largest social network. "Mark personally didn't like the punishment, so he changed the rules," a former policy employee told BuzzFeed News, noting that the original rule had already been in use and represented the product of untold hours of work between multiple teams and experts.

"That was the first time I experienced having to create a new category of policy to fit what Zuckerberg wanted. It's somewhat demoralizing when we have established a policy and it's gone through rigorous cycles..." said a second former policy employee who, like the first, asked not to be named so they could speak about internal matters...

Zuckerberg's "more nuanced policy" set off a cascading effect, the two former employees said, which delayed the company's efforts to remove right wing militant organizations such as the Oath Keepers, which were involved the Jan. 6 insurrection at the US Capitol. It is also a case study in Facebook's willingness to change its rules to placate America's right wing and avoid political backlash.

Internal documents obtained by BuzzFeed News and interviews with 14 current and former employees show how the company's policy team — guided by Joel Kaplan, the vice president of global public policy, and Zuckerberg's whims — has exerted outsize influence while obstructing content moderation decisions, stymieing product rollouts, and intervening on behalf of popular conservative figures who have violated Facebook's rules. In December, a former core data scientist wrote a memo titled, "Political Influences on Content Policy." Seen by BuzzFeed News, the memo stated that Kaplan's policy team "regularly protects powerful constituencies" and listed several examples, including: removing penalties for misinformation from right-wing pages, blunting attempts to improve content quality in News Feed, and briefly blocking a proposal to stop recommending political groups ahead of the US election.

Since the November vote, at least six Facebook employees have resigned with farewell posts that have called out leadership's failures to heed its own experts on misinformation and hate speech. Four departing employees explicitly cited the policy organization as an impediment to their work and called for a reorganization so that the public policy team, which oversees lobbying and government relations, and the content policy team, which sets and enforces the platform's rules, would not both report to Kaplan.

Facebook is blaming "technical issues" for its broken promise to the U.S. Congress to stop recommending political groups to its users, reports The Markup: Facebook made the pledge once in October, in the run-up to the presidential election, and then falsely reiterated it had taken the step after rioters overtook the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, a deadly event partially coordinated by users on the platform.

The Markup first revealed that Facebook was still recommending groups...in an investigation published on Jan. 19. Examining the top 100 groups recommended to roughly 1,900 users on our Citizen Browser panel, we identified 12 as political — including groups with posts calling for violence against lawmakers, spreading election-related conspiracy theories, and coordinating logistics for attending the rally that led to the Capitol riot.

Citizen Browser is a data-driven project examining the choices Facebook makes about what content to amplify.

A week after our report, U.S. senator Ed Markey sent a letter to the company, demanding an explanation, and on Feb. 10, Facebook replied in a letter to Markey. "The issue stemmed from technical issues in the designation and filtering process that allowed some Groups to remain in the recommendation pool when they should not have been," Facebook said in its response. "Since becoming aware of this issue, we have worked quickly to update our processes, and we continue this work to improve our designation and filtering processes to make them as accurate and effective as possible...." Following publication of our story, recommendations for political groups dropped precipitously, as our Citizen Browser panelist data shows...

The "technical issues" meant that, from Election Day on Nov. 3 to the Jan. 6 Capitol Hill riots to President Biden's inauguration on Jan. 20, Facebook was still recommending political groups to its users. Our analysis found that Facebook particularly pushed political groups to more conservative users... Facebook's own internal research has consistently pointed to the danger posed by political groups on its platform. Researchers warned Facebook in a 2016 internal report that 64 percent of new members of extremist groups joined because of the social network's recommendations, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Facebook will start reducing the amount of political content users see while scrolling their primary feeds. From a report: The social media platform will "temporarily reduce the distribution of political content in News Feed for a small percentage of people" in Brazil, Indonesia and Canada this week, it said in a blog post on Wednesday. The changes will be applied to a limited number of US users in the coming weeks. "During these initial tests we'll explore a variety of ways to rank political content in people's feeds using different signals, and then decide on the approaches we'll use going forward," Aastha Gupta, product management director at Facebook, wrote in the blog post. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg hinted at the changes during the company's earnings call last week. "One of the top pieces of feedback that we're hearing from our community right now is that people don't want politics and fighting to take over their experience on our services," he said.

The company, which has come under fire for its shortcomings in combating election misinformation and its political ad policies, claims that political content makes up only 6% of what people see on Facebook in the United States. When asked how it defines political content, Facebook said it will use artificial intelligence known as machine learning trained "to look for signals of political content and predict whether a post is related to politics." The test will include news stories about politics as well as political posts by family and friends.

All the content at TheDonald.win has now been replaced with a single post, explaining that the mod team had been struggling to deal with a flood of content from "a small group of extremists."

The Washington Post tells the story of the 41-year-old Army veteran who owned the domain — and ended up hosting the entire community that had been banned from Reddit's TheDonald forum.

"You might be happy being some ethno-nationalist, but I'm not," said Williams, recalling his exchanges with a handful of particularly hardcore moderators. "I don't want anything to do with this...."

Williams finally took decisive action on Jan. 21, two weeks after the Capitol assault, after waking to news that a group of other moderators had started their own site and used it to attack him. Soon, Williams used his power as the Web address owner to knock TheDonald offline. Then he defended himself publicly against his former compatriots, who had criticized him as a "rogue" and a selfish coward. Williams, who lives in Texas and has three young children, also endured death threats, online harassment and FBI questioning, he said...

The November election, followed by Trump's baseless claims of widespread electoral fraud, further intensified the viciousness on TheDonald. Williams said he'd become increasingly aware of what he believed were intentional efforts by nefarious actors to push the site's boundaries...

[E]ven as a Trump loyalist, scenes of Trump's supporters — some of whom almost certainly met and organized themselves on TheDonald — overrunning the Capitol depressed Williams, he said. The site soon featured in critical news reports, criminal investigations and articles of impeachment for Trump. The domain registrar, Epik, warned that the site would get kicked offline after a flood of complaints about hateful, threatening content. Incoming queries from the FBI, Epik and journalists writing about TheDonald's role in the Capitol attack inundated Williams, for whom moderating the site already had become something of a full-time job. Williams also knew that members of TheDonald community had indeed used the site to instigate the assault. "People definitely used the site to communicate and coordinate," he said, echoing the conclusions of independent researchers...

He now is spending his time caring for family and trying to get a new site, America.win, up and running. Unlike TheDonald, it will not offer unfettered discussion. It will be, he said, more of an aggregator of what Williams considers important content about free markets, individual liberty and other "common patriotic causes."

He has a parting message for those who might still be caught up in the roiling forums of the sort he once joined, then moderated, then killed off: Things often are not as they seem. QAnon is not real. What may look online like a magical, mystical voice of secret wisdom may just be a guy hiding behind the Internet's veil, trying to keep it all going, hoping it doesn't spin out of control.

hcs_$reboot shares a report from The New York Times: Rupert Murdoch's Fox Corporation and three of its popular anchors are the targets of a $2.7 billion defamation lawsuit filed on Thursday by Smartmatic, a company that became a prominent subject of discredited theories about widespread fraud in the 2020 presidential election. Smartmatic, an election technology company, filed the suit in New York State Supreme Court against the Fox Corporation, Fox News, and the anchors Lou Dobbs, Maria Bartiromo and Jeanine Pirro. As part of the same action, the company is suing Rudolph W. Giuliani and Sidney Powell, who made the case for election fraud as guests on Fox programs while representing President Donald J. Trump.

In its 276-page complaint, Smartmatic argues that Mr. Giuliani and Ms. Powell "created a story about Smartmatic" and that "Fox joined the conspiracy to defame and disparage Smartmatic and its election technology and software." Smartmatic, which provided services for the 2020 election in only one county, filed its suit in the tense aftermath of a vote that Mr. Trump and his supporters have repeatedly and falsely described as rigged or stolen. Smartmatic is seeking damages of "no less than $2.7 billion," the complaint says, and is requesting a jury trial. In a statement to CNN, Powell said: "I have not received notice or a copy of this alleged lawsuit. However, your characterization of the claims shows that this is just another political maneuver motivated by the radical left that has no basis in fact or law."

Where there's a coup, there will probably be an internet outage. From a report: Internet disruptions in Myanmar early Monday morning coincided with reports that top politicians, including the country's de-facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi, were being rounded up by the military. That's no surprise: internet blackouts are now common around the world when power hangs in the balance. At least 35 countries have restricted access to the internet or social media platforms at least once since 2019, according to Netblocks, a group which tracks internet freedom. Authorities have used the outages to reduce or prevent unrest -- or to hide it from public view. Blockages are particularly common around elections in Africa, most recently in Uganda. Netblocks also reported disruptions in Russian cities during recent protests over the detention of Alexey Navalny. Neighboring Belarus also disrupted the internet during recent protests, as have countries from Algeria to Zimbabwe.

With Reddit's interest in sending some stocks soaring showing no sign of slowing down, the trading app Robinhood started restricting some transactions Thursday morning. Reddit wasn't happy -- and neither are some lawmakers. From a report:The incident apparently struck an unusual bipartisan chord, with Texas Republican Ted Cruz throwing his weight behind progressive Democrats who called out the company. Rep. Rashida Tlaib called Robinhood's decision "beyond absurd" and suggested that the House Financial Services Committee hold a hearing on what she deemed "market manipulation" from the personal finance startup. "They're blocking the ability to trade to protect Wall St. hedge funds, stealing millions of dollars from their users to protect people who've used the stock market as a casino for decades," Tlaib said. Her colleague Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez -- a member of that committee -- chimed in with support for a hearing on Robinhood, calling the situation an "unacceptable" step to prevent retail investors from trading. Seeing Cruz and Ocasio-Cortez line up on anything right now is unusual, to put it mildly. Silicon Valley Rep. Ro Khanna also flagged Robinhood's decision to stop some trades, slamming the startup for freezing out small investors while powerful hedge funds scramble to get control of the situation.

AmiMoJo shares a report from Live Science: In his inaugural address last week, President Joe Biden called for unity. But how can Americans come together, given what seems to be growing political contention and deep divides? New research suggests the answer can be found in stories, not statistics. People respect those they disagree with more when their position comes from a place of personal experience, not facts and figures, finds a new series of experiments published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. This is especially true when the personal stories are rooted in experiences of harm or vulnerability.

"In moral disagreements, experiences seem truer than facts," said Kurt Gray, a psychologist and director of the Center for the Science of Moral Understanding at the University of North Carolina. For the new research, Gray and his colleagues focused on how facts versus experiences affected people's perceptions of their opponent's rationality and their respect for that opponent. Over 15 separate experiments, they found that, although people think they respect opponents who present facts, they actually have more respect for opponents who share personal stories.

In March Andrew Yang's nonprofit gave $1,000 one-time grants to a thousand residents in the Bronx. This week a new article in the New Yorker asks one of those grant recipients how they feel about Yang's newest proposal as he runs to be New York's mayor: to give the city's public-housing residents billions of dollars in a "Borough Bucks" currency that would hopefully recirculate in the community: "I was like, you know, am I the only person here that would love to live in a society where we can actually barter our talents and skills, instead of depending on this economy that's not working for us?"

Yang made a similar point when I asked him about the origins of the Borough Bucks proposal. "If you're going to invest resources in a community, your preference is that the resources circulate within the community, particularly if you can serve multiple goals," he said. "They're just imaginative ways for communities to unlock resources."
The article also notes that in an earlier run for the U.S. presidency, "his pitch was that the economy needed to be modernized to account for automation and other technological advances. In his mayoral run, his pitch is that New York City should become the 'anti-poverty' city." But they explored the larger question of whether Yang sees a growing acceptance for universal basic incomes: I asked Yang about the debate, now happening in Congress, about whether Biden should push for fourteen-hundred-dollar stimulus checks in the next bailout package, or two-thousand-dollar checks, or two thousand dollars a month until the economy rebounds. Yang said that he favored the last proposal.

I asked him how he felt about the fact that even as other candidates in the race were attacking him, several — Eric Adams, the former nonprofit executive Dianne Morales, and the City Council member Carlos Menchaca — had expressed interest in the U.B.I. policies he had championed. "I would love to check out their plans," Yang said. "It's an idea whose time has come. I'm certainly very proud to have contributed to the idea's popularity, but anyone who wants to adapt a version of it, like, fantastic."

While NBC News reported on Tuesday that Facebook "has no plan in place to lift the indefinite suspension on President Donald Trump's Facebook account," there was a new twist two days later.

"Facebook on Thursday announced that it will refer its decision to indefinitely suspend the account of former President Donald Trump to its newly instituted Oversight Board," reports CNBC: The independent body, which has been described as Facebook's "Supreme Court," will review the decision to suspend Trump and make a binding decision on whether the account will be reinstated. Until a decision is made, Trump's account will remain suspended, the company said in a blog post.

The board will begin accepting public comments on the case next week, it said in a tweet. It will have up to 90 days to make its decision, but its members have committed to move as quickly as possible, a spokesman for the body told CNBC. A decision can't be overruled by CEO Mark Zuckerberg or other executives.
"We believe our decision was necessary and right..." Facebook's VP of Global Affairs wrote on their blog, adding "We look forward to receiving the board's decision — and we hope, given the clear justification for our actions on January 7, that it will uphold the choices we made..." Some said that Facebook should have banned President Trump long ago, and that the violence on the Capitol was itself a product of social media; others that it was an unacceptable display of unaccountable corporate power over political speech. We have taken the view that in open democracies people have a right to hear what their politicians are saying — the good, the bad and the ugly — so that they can be held to account. But it has never meant that politicians can say whatever they like. They remain subject to our policies banning the use of our platform to incite violence. It is these policies that were enforced when we took the decision to suspend President Trump's access.

Whether you believe the decision was justified or not, many people are understandably uncomfortable with the idea that tech companies have the power to ban elected leaders. Many argue private companies like Facebook shouldn't be making these big decisions on their own. We agree... It would be better if these decisions were made according to frameworks agreed by democratically accountable lawmakers. But in the absence of such laws, there are decisions that we cannot duck.

This is why we established the Oversight Board. It is the first body of its kind in the world: an expert-led independent organization with the power to impose binding decisions on a private social media company. Its decision will be available at the board's website when it is issued.

President Joe Biden has named Jessica Rosenworcel, the FCC's leading Democrat, as acting FCC chairwoman. She is replacing Ajit Pai, who concluded his four years as chairman yesterday. Engadget reports: Rosenworcel is known as defender of net neutrality policies, and as an advocate for closing the "homework gap," a reference to students who lack high-speed internet at home. As acting chair, Rosenworcel will lead the FCC until the Senate confirms a permanent replacement. With Pai's departure, there's currently one spot open at the FCC for Biden to fill.

Outgoing President Donald Trump has signed an executive order aimed at thwarting foreign use of cloud computing products for malicious cyber operations against the United States, the White House said on Tuesday, Trump's last full day in office. From a report: The order, first reported by Reuters, gives the Commerce Department authority to write rules to bar transactions with foreigners in cloud computing products or services, if a foreigner uses them for cyber attacks. "What we have seen in this space is that...an individual will rent thousands of pieces of this infrastructure inside the United States and resell them to actors who then abuse them," a senior administration official told Reuters. "This provides the Secretary of Commerce the ability to say...' There is no reason for you to continue to have access to the nation's products,'" the person added, noting the restrictions could apply to jurisdictions as well as people and companies. The order also requires the agency to write rules in six months for U.S. providers of Infrastructure as a Service, a type of cloud computing, to verify the identity of foreigners with whom they do business and keep certain records.

Facebook has no plan in place to lift the indefinite suspension on President Donald Trump's Facebook account following his departure from the White House on Wednesday, NBC News reported Tuesday, citing sources familiar with the company's plans said. From the report: The ban on Trump's account remains indefinite, the sources said, and there is no current plan in place to lift it. The social media giant said on Jan. 7 that it would "indefinitely" ban the president's account due to his role in inciting the attack on the U.S. Capitol a day earlier. The company said the ban would last at least through the end of his term. Facebook's suspension stopped short of the permanent ban that other social media companies like Twitter and Snapchat lated placed on Trump's accounts.
UPDATE: CNBC reported two days later that Facebook had announced "it will refer its decision to indefinitely suspend the account of former President Donald Trump to its newly instituted Oversight Board," and it would be that Board which would ultimately make the final determination.

In a blog post, Facebook still that "we hope, given the clear justification for our actions on January 7, that it will uphold the choices we made..."

Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo quotes the Washington Post: Amazon said it will remove merchandise related to QAnon, a discredited conspiracy theory that the FBI has identified as a potential domestic terrorist threat, just a day after the e-commerce giant suspended the pro-Trump social media site Parler from using its cloud computing technology.

Amazon is beginning to remove QAnon products from its site, a process that could take a few days, spokeswoman Cecilia Fan said Monday afternoon following inquiries from The Washington Post and other media outlets. Third-party merchants that attempt to evade Amazon's systems to list QAnon goods may find their selling privileges revoked, Fan added.