It’s OK to Be Not OK

The importance of stepping away from work in times of stress

You may have heard the news about a rather popular but controversial app being banned by multiple platform providers. One of those providers said in a statement, “AWS does not pre-screen its customers, but it does have terms of service that must be followed…that use of the content you supply does not violate this policy and will not cause injury to any person or entity.”

While you might think I am referring to Parler, the quote above was from ten years ago in reference to Wikileaks. This was the organization that published large troves of classified documents and became infamous in the process. The growing popularity of the site however eventually drew scrutiny of their platform providers, who started to dissociate with Wikileaks.

There has been much debate about free speech and becoming deplatformed. History shows however that many apps over the years have been banned, all for fair and justified reasons. Dog Wars promoted animal cruelty. Girls Around Me was a creepy invasion of privacy. Fortnite tried to circumvent Apple’s monetization rules. The common theme among all of them is that they violated the terms of service.

The even bigger news though were the events in the US the led up to Parler getting booted from all of their technology providers. The world was shocked to see the images emerge from Washington DC on January 6th, a day that will be remembered in history. For many of us, trying to…