Amazon.com Inc has planned to take a more proactive approach to determine what types of content violate its cloud service policies such as rules against promoting violence. It will hence enforce its removal. It is a move likely to renew debate about how much power tech companies should have to restrict free speech.
In the next few months, Amazon will hire a small group of people in its Amazon Web Services (AWS) division to develop expertise and work with outside researchers to monitor for future threats, according to a source familiar with the matter. It would turn Amazon into one of the world’s most powerful arbiters of content allowed on the internet.
Amazon may the headlines last week in the Washington Post for shutting down a website hosted on AWS that featured propaganda from Islamic State that celebrated the suicide bombing that killed an estimated 170 Afghans and 13 US troops in Kabul last Thursday. They did so after the news organisation contacted Amazon.
