On the one hand, Patreon shouldn't have to do business with people they don't like. On the other hand, at what point do we accept that we have different viewpoints and live and let live?

The biggest one for me in recent history was Cloudflare arbitrarily deciding to stop hosting the Daily Stormer. Sure, DS is vile, but at the point we start enforcing censorship on a whim instead of hardened policies that aren't selectively enforced, I think it becomes worrisome.

I guess I don't have a problem with people deciding what messages they do and do not want to support, as much as I have a larger problem with the rest of the world handing them the reigns.

Centralization is the real evil, here. Why are we giving companies and people the right to silence vast amounts of voices and opinions on random whims?

Then you see counter-arguments, like "well if you don't want to get banned, don't say bad things!" But then, who decides what's bad? The societal norms are shifting to a place where there are certain topics that are not allowed to be discussed at all even if looking at them from a critical lens. So, there are problems that people have, and things that need to be talked about, but they aren't allowed to say anything about it. They can only reference the idea from some distant euphemism.

The ones that do use their voices are banished to the shadows where, not only do they not stop thinking and saying what they were before, but now they dig their heels in further. They spread out to forums that will have them, and incidentally tend to allow hate speech or inciting violence. So we're taking the ideas we do not find palatable and sending them off to a distant land where the other bad ideas go to twist and tear and fester and rot.

To me, personally and anecdotally, this seems to be happening with increasing velocity. We're tightening our grip on what speech is acceptable and using centralized services to force this control on ourselves, over a platform that has always been about the open exchange of ideas.

So what do we do? I don't know. Privately-owned services should be free to censor. People should also continue to speak freely (if legal). I certainly think Net Neutrality is essential at this point, whether enforced via public infrastructure or some kind of over-arching regulation. But, there's not much anyone can do in the current framework of things other than encourage decentralization. And I do, when I can.

Also, for the record, I'm a feminist, left-leaning socialist. So good luck writing me off as another conservative windbag who doesn't understand the first amendment that's crowing about censorship. I think censorship is a problem, whether it's via private platforms or not.

The government, soapboxes, homes and places of business that are happy to have them.

Freedom of Speech is not the right to be heard. If people don't like what you have to say, or how you are saying it, they are free to walk away. If you don't like what someone is doing in your place of business, you can also throw them out. That includes being allowed to throw a loud ranting racist out of a, say, pub or a website.

These individuals are free to create their own businesses and websites which facilitate whatever kind of discourse they please, nobody can take that away from them (unless they venture into fighting words). They, however, seem to want to be where their ideas are not wanted[1].

Patreon would likely be happy to have a conservative on their website if the primary concern of the content was not intolerance.

> I'm torn about this.

Karl Popper helps clear it up[2]. His wording surrounding FoS is particularly illuminating because it doesn't specifically calling out left-extremists or right-extremists; both have been pretty awful about attacking speech, especially the escalation over the past few years.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vote_brigading [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

People keep saying this and repeating it, but as far as I can tell this meme is destructive and wrong. Freedom of speech isn't just a legal assurance that congress shall make no law abridging it. It is also a set of cultural norms rooted deeply in a long lineage of hard won ideas. It is Evelyn Hall's principle "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it". It is Friedrich Nietzsche's dictum that only insecure societies are threatened by quirky characters with weird ideas. It is our own Daniel Gackle's observation that tolerance is the experience of suffering through unpleasant ideas. We endure that suffering because the world is dramatically better on balance when we do.

Popper and the paradox of tolerance have nothing to do with it because we aren't talking about fascists angling to march on Washington DC to burn down the Library of Congress. We're talking about people who may have made a careless remark, or have quirky ideas, or disagree with the overall bent of the arc of history.

By banning these people platforms like Twitter and Patreon are eroding free speech not in the legal sense, but in the cultural norms sense. If these norms continue getting eroded, god help us all -- it may set humanity and the western civilization back by hundreds of years.

20 years ago, before social media, there was no assumption that everyone has a fundamental right to be able to broadcast their ideas using others' platforms. Since publication was more resource-intensive, the default for most media was to not publish things, and deciding that someone's ideas didn't merit publication wasn't seen as a violation of any great moral code. They were always free to self-publish. At their own expense, of course.

Fast forward, and, since most these sites default to letting anyone publish on their platform, with no questions asked beforehand, we've apparently come to think that using these platforms is a human right. It is not. It is a privilege. One with which they have been quite liberal with sharing, yes, but one that they are still free to revoke at any time.

There's another important right to consider, in this siuation: Freedom of association. It is also fundamental, and it goes hand-in-hand with freedom of speech. It encompasses, among other things, the right to not associate with people you don't want to be associated with. If Patreon, a private entity, does not want to be associated with sexism and racism, they should not be required to do so.

> The difference is that the internet has discontinuously more scalable network effects, so technology companies often find themselves in a winner-takes-all dynamic. If some publisher, newspaper, or literary magazine refused to publish Walt Whitman, he could always try and find another publisher. But if Twitter bans Titania McGrath, there is no other Twitter for her to join because the next best alternative has 1/10000th the number of users.

> This effect is new. These platforms are private entities, but effectively they operate as public commons. So culturally we must treat them similar to public commons where it isn't acceptable to kick out quirky characters because some of us don't like what they have to say.

"If you are only able to speak freely when no one is forced to listen to you - are you then allowed freedom of speech?"

This isn't some guy shouting in the street or some other public place (who, funnily enough, everyone usually agrees with their removal), but someone shouting on what is effectively private property.

You also need to remember that the places we're talking about are de facto public spaces due to their practical monopolies on speech. They are private spaces legally and the companies who own them can be as discriminatory as they want in regards to who they allow to speak from a legal standpoint, but they shouldn't abuse their power to do so.

If they do discriminate too much, they should be regulated to be neutral places for speech, considering their excessive clout. A future where a select group of companies control what people hear, discuss and think is scary.

The analogy is appropriate in the sense that its not the "shouting" that is offensive, but rather that the message is considered offensive in the private place where it is expressed against the wishes of the owner of that private place.

Indeed. I take the same stance with regard to Facebook and others. If you don't want them to sell your data, stop willingly giving them your data.

> nobody owes you one, but these companies accrue the astronomical benefits of massive network effects and are changing the ecology of our society

I don't dispute the massive impact of social media on society, but ultimately that is the collective responsibility of society, not private platforms that arbitrarily become targets based on their popularity. Why aren't we trying to regulate myspace or livejournal? What is the arbitrary DAU metric that demands someone's website must be regulated? If the site suffers from PR or technical issues that drop the DAU numbers, do they automatically regain the ability to operate their site however they like? Society needs to grapple with the reality that these websites have no real power over us. The next big platform that people will complain is censoring them doesn't even exist yet.

Facebook is abusively invasive, and no amount of appeals to user choice changes that. Victim-blaming is a real thing and a real problem.

They don't understand the full depth, but they know enough to understand that Facebook is violating their privacy in ways that they don't understand. They know that Facebook is unhealthy and insecure. Anyone with any political leaning has a lot to say about the ills of Facebook. People pretty much get the idea that Facebook is a bad actor.

> Facebook is abusively invasive, and no amount of appeals to user choice changes that

It's not an appeal to user choice, it's an appeal to basic property rights. If I buy a bunch of servers and throw them up on the internet I can do whatever I want with them, it's not my fault if you choose to access my servers, at my expense, and litter it with your own personal data. Of course Facebook is abusive, but there's literally zero reason you are obligated to use Facebook. ...it's an app, just uninstall it.

Are people supposed to all become individual experts about the problems and learn the best ways to opt out of each and every aspect of unhealthy parts of our culture? Why people do what they do and how things work overall are much more complex than simple quips you're making. No comment the size of what we're typing can get at much of the complexity here.

Your whole "no obligation" argument is just so simplistic and dismissive. Facebook actively pushes people to use it using every method they can think of from subsidizing access fees in much of the world that is late to the internet to using every addictive psychological trick anyone has discovered.

This has nothing to do with property rights. That's just non sequitur. That argument is as reasonable as saying that Facebook is just a bunch of math, since that's all programs are, and then arguing something about how math can't hurt anyone or some similar nonsense.

Why exactly? The New York Times and the wire services were once the primary venue for most newspaper publication. There was never a requirement that anyone be able to write articles for them.

The thing is allowing garbage views into "record of note" publications seriously empowers them. As an earlier article points out, youtube's algorithm is weight towards feeding people polarized extremist rants because these get responses (just the other day, my suggested "next videos" included a client change denier and Jordan Peterson for zero reason). We're looking at the result of extreme ideological polarization and these don't look pretty. A good portion of what could be called "hate speech" is pseudo-science presenting itself as science and this to someone who's (probably foolishly) expecting a bit of vetting on a large website, this pseudo-science sell is especially effective.

Moreover, a large portion of those who uses a social network know that the "open web" exists and are quite capable of cruising it. Again, by letting into a venue the naive person imagines is vetted, you have increased its momentum considerably.

The average person isn't necessary super competent at sorting modern issues. A good portion of heinous content leverages this by appearing respectable and being the web site of

People could rightly have complained from a "free speech" position if the NYT published only left-wing letters-to-the-editor. They could also rightly complain if the NYT explicitly refused to publish a totally reasonable opinion piece (or more extreme: refuse a paid ad that was totally reasonable) because of tangential critiques of the author's statements in other contexts.

Does that mean the NYT would have to do whatever the complainers say? No. But such complaints fairly relate to the ideas of "free speech norms" regardless of the NYT being an independent business.

No one? Hyperbole like this only serves to muddy the waters.

Furthermore, I'm curious if those who believe that having access to social media needs to be considered a fundamental right really have the courage of their convictions: If this is the case, then we've got bigger problems than whether or not Milo Yiannopoulos can use it to act like a tool in public. There are whole classes of people who don't have easy access to the hardware and constant Internet connections required to take part, and their freedom of speech has clearly been curtailed. Perhaps there's a need to set up a social fund to ensure that their basic human rights are being preserved by buying them smartphones with data plans, and forcing the nation's cellular providers to extend coverage to every nook and cranny of the country.

Yes. Of course you are being allowed freedom of speech.

We're not discussing what IS, we are discussing what SHOULD BE. The fact that twitter is way more popular than Mastodon absolutely DOES change something... it changes the number of people who can hear the message. One might argue that this SHOULD not make a person's right to be heard on Twitter any different than their right to be heard in a small-town newspaper; another might argue that it SHOULD alter those rights. Any sensible discussion needs to be rooted in the question of what our values are.

I cannot lay out your values for you, but at least I can explain my own. For me, freedom of speech is an important value primarily because it protects those with correct but controversial or unpopular opinions from being silenced. Also to some extent "freedom of speech" is a terminal value for me: people being allowed to express themselves is a thing I value for its own sake.

So how do I run this analysis? Well, the claim is that there are incredibly strong network effects on a system like Twitter, Facebook, and their ilk. In other words, the existence of Twitter nearly guarantees that Mastodon cannot grow very large. And this is different from what happened with newspapers. It is closer to what happened with the telephone system. Although not 100% true, I think there is a great deal of truth to this claim.

So what do we do? One possibility is to say that the network effects shouldn't make any difference, and that we should regulate Twitter (and Facebook, and other similarly situated platforms) like we do newspapers (give them free rein to control what appears on their platforms). This is the position that our legal system is taking at the moment.

Another possibility is to consider this to be closer to the telephone system. Remember that for years there was a single phone system throughout the US, run by a single company (AT&T, "Ma Bell"). Until automated switching systems became fully capable the phone company even had operators who connected calls and were capable of listening in. But they never put in place a policy of kicking people off of the phone system if they talked about topics that AT&T didn't like.

If AT&T had used such a policy it could have drastically altered the history of things like the civil rights movement. Would AT&T have chosen to ban those who supported the KKK and lynchings, or would they have chosen to ban the Black Panthers and those who violated the law in their quest to push for change? I'm not sure which side they would have been on, and I wouldn't want the outcome of the civil rights struggle to have been decided by executives at one company rather than through the collective struggles of the citizens of the country.

So historically, we regulated publishers of newspapers and books one way and the telephone company another way, and looking back at history I am confident that we made the right choice both times. I am not so sure about the way we regulate Twitter and Facebook. Their network effects are less strong than were those of the telephone system, but are still massive. I find this a difficult call to make.

Patreon, on the other hand, seems more clear. There are other payment systems and the network effects are less powerful. If Patreon wants to restrict who can get paid through their platform then other platforms can arise and so long as Patreon isn't leveraging their market dominance to crush these upstarts, that should be fine by me.

Alas it's not left xor right wing ideas that get censored, but really the anti-authoritarian ideas and attitude. Don't you know that all those radio stations were just nobly deciding to not broadcast Imagine?

Plus ça change.

Honestly though, I have another theory. There is no sense of entitlement or hypocrisy, no confusion about what is or isn’t censorship. What we’re seeing is almost purely calculated, and just about trying to get a bigger audience. Twenty years ago if you wanted to publish your ideas about the queen of England being a lizard, you had to either self-publish, rant to a crowd, print fliers, or get lucky. Not that long ago blogs and forums were a huge improvement for those people, and it’s still very effective, but less effective than Facebook or Twitter or YouTube.

So do they really think that having the ability to self publish to the planet through blogs and modern self-publishing doesn’t count as speech? Or... do they just want more, and realize that position of “I want more” is less appealing than “I fight censorship!” It’s not that they don’t get it, it’s that it’s inconvenient to admit it?

https://wannabewonk.com/gab-and-free-speech-on-the-internet/

Summary: I agree, largely. Socially, we should be able to debate people with diverse opinions without turning the world into one big safe space. As far as the rights of hosting platforms: There has to be a line somewhere. I draw the line at CAs, ISPs and registrars. They should have to serve ANYONE unless the government mandates otherwise. Maybe Twitter and AWS shouldn't have to support abhorrent speech, but my home ISP can't pick and choose if I reach the larger world.

Social media companies, in the other hand, are more like the modern version of newspapers and magazines. And you don't have the right to be published been the most popular magazine simply because there's where the most readers are.

However, I would put cloud companies like AWS in the bucket of utilities and not media. Gab shouldn't have to worry about being cut off for lack of a hosting company. We can't say, "go find another social media home" to people we disagree with, only to watch in glee as the social media companies that will have them are shut down for lack of a hosting company or data center.

And yes, I realize how massively outdated that example was.

I definitely remember the 80s and 90s with controversy over Walmart not carrying “obscene” records. Or nc-17 movies not being played by movie theaters. Or books being banned from libraries (public and private).

It wasn’t Facebook, but it was definitely a similar theme of cultural norms not being upheld and corporate powers suppressing free speech. Just like now.

To map the space of possible compromises it is useful to think (1)"what would i do if the roles were reversed", (2)"does the opposing idea leave any space for compromise or should it be forcefully eliminated", (3)"is the opposing party weak enough to cheat and not give the treatment you wouldn't want to get in its place".

I think most of us would agree that (2) should be rulled out unless the opposing idea is itself violent, (3) is unfair and also dangerous if the opposing party is stronger than it seems.

If we agree on the above then from (1) a reasonable compromise is to allow reprehencible people to say their non-violent reprehencible things in exchange of us saying things that are reprehencible to them.

Coming back to the Freedom of association for platforms, we should consider that the value of these platforms is largely in the people using them, so in a way they belong to their users, and don't have much choice.

Many people think that the platform they use should be reliable and therefore not be able to randomly decide with whom it wants to be associated.

But many people also think that some reprehencible speach should be banned.

If platform decides to not be neutral and take the side of the second group, it makes a bet that the first group and the banned group are not powerful enough to compare with the second group, and moves stakes away from compromise towards play on elimination. It may succeed but a pushback from the banned group and large part of the first group is entirely natural.

I hope that i managed to convince you that the position taken by the first group is more rational, as it leads to a more stable state.

And if a platform absolutely has to take sides because second group of their users is too large/vocal, it may be better to do that by means that leave some space for a compromise. E.g. display a red badge near the name of disassociated users or display green for good users.

Twitter is the most straightforward regarding freedom of association: they are literally providing you with a platform to say things, and to broadcast saying things. They're a private company. If they decide they hate everyone born on May 4th or something, fuggit, they've (legally and philosophically) got that right.

Patreon and PayPal, on the next hand, are payment processors. They're not the only payment processors. Patreon also provides you with more publicity for yourself as a payee than PayPal does. Still, these digital payment processors are the cash of the internet. Before we had them, or just when we were teenagers, the best you could do was ask for Mom and Dad's credit-card number, or maybe send a money-order (remember those) by mail to some dude for stuff. It was a damned shady way to do business and we all ditched it the first thing we could.

Next comes CloudFlare. They literally just provide mirroring and maintenance for your web-servers. You supply the software and the content, yes? They don't even publicize you; in fact, they try to avoid publicizing you by keeping your site visible and their service invisible.

At what point does any of these things become, ethically speaking, a common carrier, providing something like unto a public utility, requiring some degree of common carrier protections to make sense as a business?

Are we really going to insist that once you're selling nasty porn or passing out Nazi pamphlets over the Internet there should be no equivalent of payment in cash or a private copy machine that lets you operate a deeply unpopular, even immoral, enterprise without asking the permission of a major advertising firm? In the physical world we have public spaces and legal tender that guarantee us real spaces in which to carry out our legal rights to do things everyone else despises. We should have some equivalent of that over the web, too.

I have a feeling that Western civilization which has for most of its existence censored people across nearly all media for offences as mild as saying "damn", displaying a naked person or drawing a particular shape of mouse without permission is not about to collapse because the management of a particular web platform decides that Carl Benjamin arguing with other white supremacists about whether they're behaving like "niggers" or "white people" isn't the sort of thing they wish to financially support. This really is the reductio ad absurdum freedom of speech argument.

Not among those hard-won norms are: hate speech, incitement of violence against groups and individuals, either directly or by thinly disguised dog whistles. Those voices, though they were always present among people, were held back, suppressed if you will, by large media organizations since around the end of the second world war, and definitely since the civil rights movement, when public exclamations of hate-speech and racism became taboo. Prior to that, it was common for newspapers to regularly carry articles that we would today consider vile and bigoted. But norms changed for the better.

But the internet came along and gave a medium to hate speech that had been restrained for decades by traditional media. Bemoaning the restraint of hate speech now is lamenting the loss of a forum which has existed for only 20 years or so, from roughly when the internet became a popular medium, and was discovered by existing hate groups.

The rise of, and tacit societal acceptance of mass-distributed hate speech via the Internet was actually the erosion of the norm, rather than the other way around.

Haven’t these norms already been well established? I mean, almost every business which deals in exposure to humans sensory inputs has always seemed to have standards. Concert venues, magazines, record companies, night clubs with stages, publishing outlets etc etc... all of these business owners have always been able to pick and choose what types of output they send to the humans consuming that output. Hasn’t this always been the norm?

I’m just curious why some insinuate this is an enormous step backward when from my perspective it would seem to be SOP for a society which idolizes private property.

> The difference is that the internet has discontinuously more scalable network effects, so technology companies often find themselves in a winner-takes-all dynamic. If some publisher, newspaper, or literary magazine refused to publish Walt Whitman, he could always try and find another publisher. But if Twitter bans Titania McGrath, there is no other Twitter for her to join because the next best alternative has 1/10000th the number of users.

> This effect is new. These platforms are private entities, but effectively they operate as public commons. So culturally we must treat them similar to public commons where it isn't acceptable to kick out quirky characters because some of us don't like what they have to say.

This is pretty much exactly wrong (the situation is basically the exact opposite). When there were a very finite number of publishers in the English speaking world and self-publishing barely existed, an idea that could not be published would only diffuse by word of mouth. When Henry Miller could only be published in France, his works were only available to a very small number of individuals even if many could be interested.

Anyone banned from every single media site still can create a website, publish on Tor, etc. The inability to get a million followers is far from the inability to get your ideas heard. The argument confuses an inability to make money with an inability to be hear (and feel free to argue about the right make money with incindiary ideas, that obviously has a different implication).

By creating the ability to bypass publisher, the Internet produced a situation where far more ideas could be heard than previously. That situation still exists (for good and less-good). The average person still depends on filters but those filters are voluntary and a substantial portion of people know they can bypass them if they wish. And I'd say present days are also wider than earlier filters.

Which is to say that net now certainly makes a wider range of views available to those interested than ever before. There's still individual apathy or skepticism keeping people from sample this Niagara but that doesn't seem like the worst. Many people like their platform filtering out racist garbage and hey, that seems like not entirely terrible.

But the contrast is that in a small city in the US in the 1950s, a person would have to physically leave their location to get more "risque" or "extreme" publications of any political stripe.

That free speech allows people who advocate crimes to be watched hardly by itself is hardly argument that this isn't really free speech.

I mean, to some extent, I think it's OK fascist have some venue for their expression. That having such a venue should benefit them rather than being an opportunity for them to hoist themselves on the own petard really doesn't seem like something they can demand.

I mean, I do recognize the scalability and network effects, but I’m still not convinced it is any different from the distant past or the recent past.

This is not about "weird people with quirky ideas". This is about people who use speech to abuse, cause harm, intimidate, harass, or inspire others to commit such abuses. This cannot be tolerated in a society that wants the right to "Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

One can always find a non-abusive way to present an idea. But when they cross the line into a form of abuse or violence, they should be stopped.

I don't think you mean all people... because in the same sentence you advocate harm (or the de facto threat thereof) to some people based on what they might say. So is this hurt feelings? Actual physical harm (or the fear thereof)?

Or are you suggesting that people should be free only to say those things within some pre-approved range of ideas of which people like-minded to yourself are prepared to tolerate?

To be specific, if you're saying that any person that would advocate physical harm, or cause a reasonable person to be fearful of physical harm, should be prevented from speaking... then I'm likely with you. If you really mean more than that, then "hell no!" back at ya.

On the other hand, if you shout "fire" in a crowded place, you make yourself responsible of causing a dangerous situation. Same as flying a drone over an airport or throwing stones from a building.

You can see parallels with white extremists that write racist screeds, and later go on to commit violence themselves, or when their writing inspires violence. One former white supremacist who was the leader of a popular white supremacist punk band admitted he knew there were people who committed violence and quoted his music as an inspiration, which in part helped him leave his old views behind.

To paraphrase Bob Dylan, music can't keep a revolution going. But it can and does encourage people to act.

And I am not meaning just "controversial" social/political views - for example FPS games were often tarred as "violence inciting" with little to no evidence just 15years ago. In current framework, that would be enough to actually ban them. Do you really think it's a good idea to go down this rabbit hole of banning anything that "might" lead to violence one day?

Does it mean we should ignore dogwhistling? Honestly, I don't know. It's a really hard problem I think. And current "solutions" of deplatforming "extremists" don't seem to be working towards reducing actual violence / social tension, so I don't think it's the right approach.

Do we philosophically want to live in a world where people can be incited to great amounts of violence just because we want to protect FoS on private platforms?

Do we want to live in a world, where everyone will be scared to say anything socially unacceptable (because it _might_ lead to violence!) because of the total deplatforming that might happen as a conseqence?

There is a lot of blurring around the definition of "inciting violence", and I am scared of the slippery slope too.

I want to live in a world where anyone is free to say any stupid idea they want, and anyone else is free to correct them or ignore them or do whatever they like.

Actual harm/abuse/harassment should be illegal of course, like the kind where a person is physically doing stuff to another person against their will.

But if blocking a person on twitter is all it takes to avoid "harassment", maybe that's the best way to deal with that.

"Before your stupid social justice feminine bullshit, [mass murders] didn't happen on this scale, it's crazy. This is a disease of the modern age. YOU are responsible for perpetuating it, by disenfranchising these poor fucking guys who don't have any options left. When someone takes the option of absolute insanely last resort, you have to wonder, what kind of system is producing them? And I'll tell you what, Laci, it is a fucking feminist system that is doing this."

Quirky ideas?

"I wouldn't even rape you, @jessphillips. #AntiRapeThreats #FeminismIsCancer"

Do you really think Carl Benjamin is quirky and careless? Are you really defending him as having done something harmless, funny, or simply unthinkingly? Are you as laissez-faire about, say, the anti-vaccine crowd or the creationists---they're just disagreeing "with the overall bent of the arc of history?"

In a more serious mode, have you any evidence that we are "talking about people who may have made a careless remark, or have quirky ideas, or disagree with the overall bent of the arc of history?" I would think everyone would be up in arms if such were the case. All of the examples I have run across are individuals who are repeatedly, deliberately and provocatively making loathsome statements, and, due to "tolerance", being applauded for it.

1) you should be able to say stupid stuff in public, as long as it does not actually cause violence ...

2) ... Which I think this does not. Yes, the line is blurred, but that's the point - is presumption of innocence a good idea?

I think yes, mainly because

3) this deplatforming apparently does not work to reduce the following of such people (I might be wrong, but have not seen any data disproving this).

Btw I get the impression that Trump has said similarly abhorrent things. Should we deplatform him? The slippery slope arguments starts to get real when you expand the bans to people like the one you quoted (assuming those were the worst things from him).

This effect is new. These platforms are private entities, but effectively they operate as public commons. So culturally we must treat them similar to public commons where it isn't acceptable to kick out quirky characters because some of us don't like what they have to say.

Yes, it’s an existing problem. I don’t understand why this is a new problem and am confused why this is unacceptable on the level that is new.

That's a de facto ban and you know it. There have been zero cases in which an internet business has kept itself above-water via asking for checks to be sent to a post-office box.

Instead, there should just be a post-office payment processor, operating over the network like all the others, and legally required to serve any customer.

Well, what's to be confused about?

Culturally we only had "freedom of speech" to the degree that we had it the way it is being described here.

Everything else is the dominant ideas (with power in government, press, etc) throwing some other up-and-coming ideas a bone.

A lot of people in the tech community and on HN sympathize with the ideology of people being deplatformed, particularly regarding alt-right and "anti-feminist" views.

The outstanding question seems to be whether this merits a degree of outrage, not whether we as a society should pass some laws that would protect creators from Patreon.

I know very little about Sargon of Akkad, but as I understand it, his comments were made in a video in which he was being interviewed, not a video that was being funded by Patreon. There's some question about the context of the comments, as to whether he was making them as an example of something a nazi might say or whether they were directed at a particular group. I don't really know.

Patreon's response was that when one of their creators exhibited behavior they didn't approve of outside of their platform (i.e. videos funded through them) that they would demand contrition and be the sole arbiter as to whether that contrition was sufficient.

Sounds worthy of a little outrage to me.

https://twitter.com/nickmon1112/status/1076886857445711872?s...

It's possible you are linking him because you believe he's a good source. It's possible you aren't aware of this and got the link to him via someone you follow. It's possible you just did a global search because you remember the story and his tweet came up. I'm not making an inference about you.

I am instead assuming you didn't know this, and that you might want to be told about it so you can be cautious about to what extent you trust his ability to relay the situation. This doesn't mean he's intrinsically wrong, but in the same regard that if Alex Jones says something he's not intrinsically wrong, but you might voluntarily opt not to cite him as evidence that Queen is a lizard.

More importantly, some nobody with a twitter account did a better job of investigative journalism than the New York Times and you’re criticising the nobody?

Because I (as I think most people) would be fine with the Patreon ban, had the payment processors' cartel stayed neutral (in our theoretical case). But once they side with Patreon, it is truly complete deplatforming, that you can't really solve by going to "another, more permissive, website".

And that is the real problem.

You can clearly see the lines he quotes in it. The words are by Patreon's own Trust and Safety representative:

MATT: Are you telling me that this was Patreon’s decision then, or someone pressured you into this?

JACQUELINE: No - this was entirely Patreon’s decision.

MATT: Well then I don’t understand passing the buck off to somebody else.

JACQUELINE: No, I’m not passing the buck off. The thing is we have guidelines, but I’m trying to explain, #1 it is our mission to fund the creative class and obviously some people may not want to be associated.

MATT: Well if it’s your mission, then payment processors are irrelevant. It’s your mission. That’s what you’re pursuing.

JACQUELINE: We’re not visa and mastercard ourselves - we can’t just make the rules. That’s what I’m saying - there is an extra layer there.

Patreon has no viable direct competitor for subscription based donations. You may not consider that to be a de facto monopoly, but that’s a semantic argument that’s orthogonal to my point.

In other words "a lot of people in the tech community" are alt-right and anti-feminist (and thus, implied, bad people with bad ideas), but weaselly put.

How about, "a lot of people in the tech community" sympathize with people being deplatformed, period? (Ever heard of the EFF? The story of the Pirate Bay and its support? DeCSS? Support for Assange?)

Sure, this which would still include people being sympathetic to "alt-right and anti-feminist". Do people have to follow your particular politics and ideological preferences wholesale to be acceptable? Perhaps those are just pure truth, and everything else is evil?

They do have to be here to be voted down, though. But they show up often enough in threads that deviate into gender politics (particularly as regards hiring and women in tech,) gender biology and, unsurprisingly, feminism. And codes of conduct. For some weird reason, a lot of people seem to believe software codes of conduct are a feminist conspiracy.

If Patreon were trying to cultivate a "brand" on the side of shunning homosexuals, shaming women who wear pants, and denigrating interracial marriage, would you have a different take on their shutting down speech? Or would you say it's Patreon's right to cultivate their public image in whatever way they see fit?

Second, even if we set aside protected classes, I don't think Patreon should be obligated to host projects it doesn't agree with, whatever they may be. It is their right to cultivate their public image in whatever way they see fit.

Of course, I also believe VISA is under no obligation to process transactions for Patreon, and so I'd sincerely hope that they'd cut off a hypothetical Patreon that exists just to enrich 4chan weirdos, and I'd work to achieve that goal in society. I would help any effort to shut down such a site.

I'm not telling you what your answer should be. I'm pointing out how your chosen answer can be turned around to bite you one day.

The right side is the side that would engage ideas. Instead, people with power are suppressing ideas and hoping they'll go away. If you need to suppress and cannot engage, then you are on the wrong side of history.

The problem is this: The power you talk of is arbitrary. People like Sargon of Akkad, who are not white supremacists, are being thrown off Patreon, while the media are giving them cover by spinning a narrative. This is the classic pattern of oppression. You vilify people with a label, which becomes meaningless as the label is expanded to conveniently cover everyone who isn't toeing the line. This is exactly what happened with "counter-revolutionaries" and those who engaged in "economic sabotage" under the iron curtain.

Their ideas aren't being suppressed.

Lots of people want to fund Sargon of Akkad, who is a center-left classical liberal. Patreon, though it is a "funding platform," refuses. That is not only an example of suppression, it's an example of this kind of dishonest "expansion" of labels with media cover through inaccurate and convenient narratives. It's an example of the kind of dishonesty which happens when people in power think they can control speech and thought.

This whole pattern of behavior with de-platforming and un-personing -- I recognize it from my past. In my personal history, it's the behavior of people who are toxic with a tribal outlook. In my youth, it was the homophobes and racists who acted like this towards me -- coercing and silencing, instead of applying universal principles and engaging in arguments.

"MY site, MY rules" is an old adage that has never been truer.

A company owned a company mining town, right down to the sidewalks and streets, then tried to apply that logic to prevent people they didn't like from distributing pamphlets. The 1st amendment should take precedence over property rights.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBozijndSLc

If you have freedom of commerce, but no individual freedoms outside of that, like freedom of speech, then you basically have China. So it's a very reasonable trade off to make: give up a little freedom of commerce to ensure more basic personal freedoms.

Neo-fascism is a real phenomenon that kills real people and Patreon doesn't want to be associated with people who have that stink on them.

OTOH if controversial content creators want the freedom to publish, fundraise and engage audiences, it behooves them to prefer audience-funded, almost-anything-goes platforms that will cater to all forms of legally-protected speech. Otherwise, they're asking for trouble in the form of arbitrary silencing.

Cultural fascism, whereby people are censored because their legal speech is unpopular, is a path towards totalitarianism and civil war.

That's technically correct, but it doesn't get at the core of the concept. If you read the original arguments in favor of freedom of speech, you'll see they don't focus on the rights of the speaker as much as the rights of the listener. John Milton, Thomas Paine, and John Stuart Mill all made the point (in various ways) that every time you stop someone from saying or publishing an idea, you are also preventing others who want to hear or read that idea from doing so. In addition, censorship requires delegating a censor. Effectively, that means you are letting someone else decide what you're allowed to read and hear. I don't know about everyone else, but there is no government body or private company that I trust with that power. Disclaimers, warnings, and age verification steps are fine, but memory-holing ideas? No thank you.

In the case of Patreon, there is a man who people want to give money to. He wants to accept that money. There is no criminal activity on either side of the transaction. Yet Patreon is preventing these people from doing what they want because Patreon dislikes one paragraph of the man's boorish utterances. This is in direct contradiction to their stated policy (where the person has to endanger the safety of others) and there's a suspicious amount of partisan bias in the application of these policies.

Patreon isn't the first company to behave this way, just the most recent. These actions increase political polarization, erode public trust in institutions and companies, and confirm the persecution complexes of many on the ends of the political spectrum. I'm sure the people in charge of these platforms feel like they're doing the right thing, but I think they are mistaken.

The platform, in this case and many, has its own reputation and business interests to consider primarily.

Are the people in charge of these platforms doing the right thing for society at large? no. Are they doing what is best for their businesses health? There are definitely arguments for both sides in that case...

If their largest demographic is liberal-ish millennials, they have a business interest to take a partisan view, which in the case of a public company can be argued as a legal obligation.

I doubt these bans are purely mercenary. The CEO of Patreon seems to be doing this because he believes it's the right thing. If you watch his video responding to the ban of Lauren Southern last year[1] (a decision I agree with, BTW), he seems totally sincere. He also understands the magnitude of his responsibility to patrons.

I think Patreon is being penny wise and pound foolish. Their social signalling helps them grab a larger chunk of a smaller pie. Every high profile ban alienates a small fraction of users, but it's a different fraction every time. It doesn't take many before Patreon's reputation is bad enough to dissuade new creators from using it. It might already be too late for them to turn around.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YmcK6GvgVPs

Patreon isn't "preventing" the transaction, they are merely choosing not to facilitate it. Respecting individual rights does not oblige anyone to help others to do what they want to do.

What is the distinction between these two terms?

If Wells Fargo refuses to let me deposit checks because of something I said, are they preventing a transaction or merely choosing not to facilitate it? After all, I could open an account at another bank.

If FedEx returns packages addressed to me because of something I said, are they preventing a transaction or choosing not to facilitate it? After all, other shipping companies exist.

I can't find a bright distinction between the two terms, but there is a distinction between behavior directly related to business (such as where the money came from or what's being shipped) and unrelated things (such as what someone said in a livestream months ago).

My points were 1. the parent's concept of free speech missed the mark and 2. Patreon has a double standard and a political bias, and that's not good for them or for society.

I'm also not saying there should be laws policing Patreon's behavior. I'm saying that while Patreon and other tech companies believe they are doing good by removing content and sanctioning its creators, they are making a mistake. If they branded themselves as a utility (similar to a power company or bank), they could guarantee themselves a larger platform in the long term. At the same time, they'd let everyone read and hear what they wanted to read and hear. They'd reduce political polarization (which seems to be creeping into every aspect of life), eliminate the Streisand effect (I'd never heard of the Daily Stormer or Gab before hosting providers refused to take their money), and make it much harder for extremists to get sympathy.

What makes you think that their bias is not good for them as a business? To me, it seems quite possible that were they to take the "principled" stance you advocate, they would soon find themselves facing much larger problems. Either their payment processors would cut them off, or they would face a larger and better organized boycott by those who prefer their current bias. Even if I'd prefer them to take a different stance for the long term benefit society, I don't see it helping them in the short term to do so.

Well it caused me to cancel all of my subscriptions. It caused Sam Harris to cancel his account. It caused a lot of people to look for alternatives. I'm pretty sure this decision hurt Patreon's bottom line.

> Either their payment processors would cut them off, or they would face a larger and better organized boycott by those who prefer their current bias.

I don't think that's true, at least not with most of the Patreon bans. Nobody was organizing a boycott of Patreon for this, and Patreon's blog post didn't say they were pressured by payment processors. Another example: When Cloudflare stopped hosting The Daily Stormer, it was because Cloudflare's CEO didn't like them claiming that Cloudflare was a secret supporter of their racist ideology. And today Cloudflare seems to have no trouble with payment processors or boycotts despite hosting the Westboro Baptist Church's website.[1]

1. https://www.godhatesfags.com/

https://twitter.com/nickmon1112/status/1076886857445711872?s...

Thread where a journalist finds evidence to that effect.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1U0mQjUA0T5INc_GDkwPJ2mfh...

Transcript of a call from the Patreon censorship department with a creator.

I doubt that they did this for any reason other than using power against people they don’t like.

> John Milton, Thomas Paine, and John Stuart Mill all made the point (in various ways) that every time you stop someone from saying or publishing an idea, you are also preventing others who want to hear or read that idea from doing so.

But no one who wants to hear or read racism is prevented from doing so — they just can't do it on Patreon. The parent's concept of free speech is fully compatible with this point, specifically because alternatives exist (and will always exist, given liberal enough laws protecting freedom of speech).

> The parent's concept of free speech is fully compatible with this point, specifically because alternatives exist (and will always exist, given liberal enough laws protecting freedom of speech).

This argument proves too much. Alternatives always exist; they just vary in how inconvenient they are. By the same logic, it would be OK if every online payment service banned Sargon and every bank refused to let him open an account. After all, an alternative still exists: His patrons could mail him cash every month.

There's no bright line here, and of course I don't think Patreon should be compelled to do business with Sargon, but I tend to worry when popular platforms erode free speech norms by policing content. Patreon is the latest example of this, and they're particularly worrying because they're responsible for people's livelihoods. I'm not alone in this worry. As the article mentions, Sam Harris has cancelled his Patreon account. He's willing to forgo tens of thousands of dollars per month today rather than let his patronage grow and risk losing more in the future. That's quite the condemnation of Patreon's judgement and of similar policies by other companies.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBpetDxIEMU

Patreon, like Facebook, has a de facto monopoly. The outstanding question is what is to be done about it.

But if you take a slightly wider look at supporting creators whose content you enjoy, then not at all. You have Twitch subscriptions, YouTube supports/members/whatever they are calling it these days, PayPal, multiple variations of crowdfunding platforms, etc...

It also seems way easier to start up something like Patreon than a FB competitor.

Here's another competitor to Patreon. They have been crippled by PayPal and Stripe refusing to process payments for them. They sound optimistic about finding replacement payment processors, and it's certainly their duty to their customers to try their best, but so far it hasn't happened. https://www.subscribestar.com/posts/5617

Elsewhere in this thread there are people pointing to indications that Patreon's banning choices were due to pressure from their own payment processors.

It's probably easy to create a Patreon competitor. If you want it to not get shut down, though, I imagine you'll have to implement ban policies at least as strict as Patreon itself. So maybe Patreon isn't a monopoly, but on the other hand, it doesn't make sense to say "It's fine if Patreon chooses whatever policies they like because, if the policies are bad, you can just start up a competitor with better policies".

The relevant monopolies/oligopolies seem to be the payment processors.

I think you're probably right. I feel like it's a semantic argument, but it's still worth having, especially when it comes to creating legislation.

There are other options and it's probably not that difficult for another company to disrupt Patreon's business model. There's still the winner-take-all phenomena in tech that makes more or less difference depending on whether your platform has a broad or narrow userbase. If one were creating anti-monopoly legislation, then this distinction might be critical.

The goal of the sort of people doing this is that there are no alternatives. Not competing platforms, not self hosting, nothing. They want to erase all such thought from all public spaces and will not stop until they do.

That is the problem.

Haven't various hosting and mirroring platforms refused to service some of these websites? I recall Gab in particular running into some trouble on that front.

>Insofar as they want to support someone monetarily, no one can prevent them from using Bitcoin.

Except for Bitcoin being non-convertible into legal tender without going through... oh look, a privately-owned payment processor.

If one wants to save up or speculate, well, thats a different matter.

Bitcoin is an anarcho-capitalist currency, and the mainstream aren't anarchists. The mainstream doesn't object to it because they object to free speech, they object to it because they like banks with their FDIC insurance and laws.

Bitcoin is failing on its own (lack of) merits, not because people are mounting some campaign to destroy it.

Sure, I guess you could say Patreon has the right to ban people from its service. But people have found its not easy or practical to compete with them. They've found everyone from their domain registrar to their website host to their payment processor refusing to do business with them.

And at some point, that means it becomes virtually impossible to express yourself if your views are unpopular enough. No one wants to be a service or common carrier, everyone buckles under controversy when it occurs. Should some views only be expressable by millionaires or people with enough resources not to need services from anyone? It's not legal censorship, but it's de facto censorship none the less.

As the likes of SubscribeStar found out, offering a 'free speech' alternative to Patreon is now virtually impossible because of it.

https://www.ft.com/content/7c4285b2-fe2f-11e8-ac00-57a2a8264...

This is how free speech has always worked, though. You could always get on a soapbox in a public plaza and rant, but the potential engaged audience there is pretty small.

If you wanted a real audience, even in older times you would've needed a newspaper to print your thoughts, or a publisher to help with your books.

"Few people will be listening to highly unpopular messages" hardly seems like something to get in a tiff over, if it's just the result of the free market of ideas.

My favorite example is Edward R. Murrow giving an entire episode to McCarthy (unedited) to explain why he felt black listing communists was necessary.

Letters to the editor are vestigial examples of this lost chivalry.

Now McCarthy has a network that will have him on any time he wants, and if he didn't he'd have a hundred online venues, including the one he runs, and most of them spend time talking about how Murrow is a "Jew Communist" or an "SJW" or whatever people say now, so it should probably not be a surprise that Murrow isn't inclined to have him on for a chat. And anyway, we're not talking about McCarthy anyway, we're talking about George Lincoln Rockwell and Robert Welsh.

And if we were talking about McCarthy, it still wouldn't be useful, because if Murrow hadn't devoted an entire episode to McCarthy, it's not like we think McCarthy would have a grievance to demand an episode devoted to him because it's his fundamental right, it would have been Murrow's editorial choice. It may well be the case that there exist venues who would do better to give extremists a voice so they can embarrass themselves, but that's quite different from a commitment to sincere pluralism to hear everyone out.

By the way, in the end, the thing that did McCarthy in was not his public supporters vanishing because his speeches embarrassed him, it was the Senate voting to censure him and effectively curbing the platform they afforded him.

Murrow had spent much of the previous year criticizing McCarthy’s attacks on freedom of speech and association.

The equivalent today would be Rachel Maddow giving an entire episode to Trump to do with as he wished.

Murrow did not have to do this - in fact he was under great pressure to just drop the thing entirely by his network. He did so because he thought it right to expose his audience to ideas other than his own. Many in the news business felt the same at the time.

In the subject being discussed, the two actors are Patreon and far-right commentators. In the metaphor, presumably Murrow stands in for Patreon, and McCarthy stands in for contemporary far-right commentators.

What I presumed to be your point is that a commitment to pluralism, as manifested by Murrow giving McCarthy a platform, would be good because McCarthy would expose his whole ass on television and so be embarrassed out of public life. I took it to be the case that you were drawing the historical parallel because everyone knows how McCarthy's story ends and so people who want a similar ending for Carl Benjamin should take note.

But I don't understand the metaphor. McCarthy wasn't hoist by his own petard, he was deplatformed. That is to say that the thing that made him irrelevant was not the public becoming deeply convinced his ideas were wrong, but elites who gatekept his access to a public platform voluntarily deplatforming him. The Senate censured him. After the censure, no one worked with him in the Senate, or talked to him. The news stopped covering him, and the bureaucracy stopped returning his phone calls. He eventually went away because everyone ignored him. In the metaphor, if we want to learn from McCarthy how to make assholes go away today, the takeaway would be to deplatform them. I agree this is a valuable historical lesson.

If that was not the point, then I assumed perhaps a secondary point was that Murrow giving McCarthy a platform was good for a commitment to pluralism -- i.e. people should be able to be exposed to bad ideas, because a little poison makes your brain stronger. Accepting for a moment that this is true, I don't see the metaphor here either.

In a world where there are three primetime news options, each of those options has a powerful ability to give or remove a platform, and that's reflected in the Murrow story. Only Murrow could give him a platform. But today, that's not the case. It was not possible for McCarthy to start a TV station in the analogy. Today, all of these far-right people can easily (and do) start their own media outlets. First, there is a major cable network who will platform anyone on the right. Second, if they reject you for being too extreme, you can move to Breitbart or TheGatewayPundit or Infowars or really anywhere else. You can tweet on Gab.

It's closer to the scenario immediately after the revolutionary war. Many newspapers would not carry what they viewed seditious speech. When speakers could not write op-eds in contemporary newspapers, they simply started their own, problem solved. No one argued that it was a violation of Matthew Lyon's free speech that newspapers wouldn't run his "Adams Is A Tyrant" op-ed. He just started his own newspaper.

And no one would argue that printing companies had to sell him the press, nor did trading outposts have to carry his newspaper, nor did skilled typesetters have to work to typeset. Everyone could contractually choose not to do business with him. Luckily for him, enough people agreed that they would do business with him, and so he kept speaking.

If people think Patreon is really mean for denying Rhodes Scholar Milo Yiannopoulous a financial lifetime, they can come up with another way to give money. May I suggest the literally hundreds of cryptocurrencies, giving us more options than ever to pay? Don't like cryptocurrencies? Nothing stopping Brain Genius Carl Benjamin from taking money via the mail or finding a payment processor run by someone who agrees with him to take bank transfers

And then my other point was that in the metaphor, a journalist gave a platform to a US senator. Patreon isn't deplatforming US senators, and neither is anyone else. They're deplatforming extreme fringe people. Maybe you like Carl Benjamin, you do you, but the historical parallel isn't McCarthy, it's legitimately socially fringe figures, like George Lincoln Rockwell. I don't think anyone gave him an episode of TV.

So if the point of the metaphor isn't that "pluralism is good" and it isn't that "sunshine is the best disinfectant", and Patreon isn't a metaphor for Murrow, and McCarthy isn't a metaphor for Benjamin, then what exactly is the point? It's not clear to me.

> If you wanted a real audience, even in older times you would've needed a newspaper to print your thoughts, or a publisher to help with your books.

The point is that getting this "help" was much easier in the past. Even people who vehemently disagreed with you would share their platform.

Circling back to Patreon, today's norms are qualitatively different from when our rules of "private platforms" were developed. If a significant portion of publishing platforms retained open minds then it was OK to have others that chose not to. Regulation was not required.

Now that this norm of fairness has been lost if we want to retain open communication of ideas on the internet then we must bring back the notion of a common carrier. Referencing the fact that the rules are the same as the past ignores how the world has changed around us.

So far the evidence presented is that there existed a journalist in TV 50 years ago who gave an episode of his television show to an elected Senator who was a political opponent. The countervailing evidence is the existence of a wide variety of mainstream platforms including some who haven't banned NASA Candidate Carl Benjamin; the zero cost of creating a new website on your own and the proliferation of platforms and sites specifically for far-right content; and that there are more publicly active far-right nuts than at any point in history and they receive less political opprobrium and better access to organized politics than any time in the last 100 years.

Take the Daily Stormer: This is an avowed neo-nazi website that denies the holocaust and uses its web platform to specifically target harassment and violence against Jews and feminists. They have no access to visa but still manage to accept private funds and use crypto. The founder of the website is a legal fugitive and a digital nomad. We're not even talking about legal far-right content like Carl Benjamin, we're talking about a guy actually under court indictment for inciting violence and harassment, and the site has a bigger megaphone than ever. And by the way, they even got dropped by Cloudflare, the website that literally doesn't ban anyone or cooperate with authorities or harassment C&Ds. But they're still online and they're still hating just as hard. Is there really a major barrier to entry for Carl "Wheel of Logic" Benjamin?

As to the notion of allowing web platforms to be common carriers, I am indifferent, but also don't feel it's relevant. I trust that Patreon doesn't want to be one. One way you can tell that Patreon doesn't want to be one is that they have never asserted themselves to be a common carrier, they have always banned certain types of content (even though the types of content may change over time), and the fact that they are happily banning far-right figures right now. If they wanted to wash their hands of it, they presumably would. Do you get the sense that Patreon's executives are doing this under extreme duress and really they would just love to host MENSA King Carl Benjamin? I guess it's really possible that the evil VISA SJWs are ruining the daily lives of the Free Speech Protestor Patreon Staff, but I somehow doubt it.

So if allowing web providers to be classed as common carriers doesn't solve the problem, what then? The alternative is that common carrier status is not a protection a provider can choose to avail themselves of, but rather a regulatory requirement of anything deemed to be infrastructural online.

If you are proposing this, that sounds interesting. I think it would take approximately 5 seconds for a Christian VPS provider to object to hosting gay porn, but if you think it's a good use of regulatory muscle to prevent that injustice, then go for it.

Maybe you recognize that's silly and instead of all web infrastructure, the suggestion is that suitably large or critical web infrastructure would be a common carrier. In this case, Patreon and Twitter are both enjoined from banning nazis, although maybe Kickstarter still could. You'd also paradoxically create a situation where Gab could ban feminists but Twitter couldn't ban Carl "The Touch Of Woman Deprives Me Of My Genius Juices" Benjamin.

It is pretty amazing to me that someone would propose reviving notions of trust regulation and busting to secure safe spaces for diaper baby nazis to cash internet welfare while whining about jew feminists... especially in a world where we don't apply any pressure to abuses by Google, Facebook, or Amazon against, you know, everyone.

But I salute your commitment to free speech, I guess.

Even though not as large, another company/service should be able to fill the void.

I have seen rumors about us gov and other govs pressuring cc authorities to do things in certain ways as well, however my senator says there is no proof rumored pressure changed anything in one case that I write about.

there is demand and market for many things that the CC companies make difficult or impossible, the problem is the CC companies make it difficult or impossible to provide to those markets.

Threats from the CC places make many places move to the side of err caution and further marginalize groups. In some cases simply removing some of the banks and such that will do business with some groups gives the few banks that do leverage to charge exorbitant fees and people live with the constant threat that their fees will go up, or the bank will give up and they will have no provider at all.

This changes published expression even when there is an option.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point

Operation Choke Point was a 2013 initiative of the United States Department of Justice,[1] which would investigate banks in the United States and the business they do with firearm dealers, payday lenders, and other companies believed to be at higher risk for fraud and money laundering.

This operation, disclosed in an August 2013 Wall Street Journal story, was officially ended in August 2017.

...

On May 29, 2014, the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform published a highly critical staff report that concluded:[21]

“ Forceful prosecution of those who defraud American consumers is both responsible and admirable. However, Department of Justice initiatives to combat mass-market consumer fraud must be legitimate exercises of the Department's legal authorities, and must be executed in a manner that does not unfairly harm legitimate merchants and individuals. Operation Choke Point fails both these requirements. The Department's radical reinterpretation of what constitutes an actionable violation under § 951 of FIRREA fundamentally distorts Congress' intent in enacting the law, and inappropriately demands that bankers act as the moral arbiters and policemen of the commercial world. In light of the Department's obligation to act within the bounds of the law, and its avowed commitment not to "discourage or inhibit" the lawful conduct of honest merchants, it is necessary to disavow and dismantle Operation Choke Point.

However I am sure that banks were indeed discriminating based upon it, in some cases refuses accounts, in other cases charging higher fees. Taking advantage of marginalized access to banking based upon 'possible scrutiny as laid out by the choke point initiative'

There may not be any evidence in that they can refuse service or raise rates and blame this or whatever that, however lets be real. The govs telling private money handlers if they touch money that was part of these things we don't like, err, have a higher chance of fraud, then we will send fed investigators to investigate you - well...

here is a list from the linked wiki mentioned in parent comment, partial / edited,

    Ammunition Sales
    Cable Box De-scramblers
    Coin Dealers
    Dating Services
    Drug Paraphernalia
    Escort Services
    Firearms Sales
    Fireworks Sales
    Government Grants
    Life-Time Memberships
    Mailing Lists/Personal Info
    Money Transfer Networks
    On-line Gambling
    Pharmaceutical Sales
    Pornography[5]
    Racist Materials
    Surveillance Equipment
    Telemarketing
    Tobacco Sales
    Travel Clubs

The internet did break the press oligopolies, and brought some free exchange of ideas, carrying large changes. But instead of staying a platform where ideas can compete as equals, it is consolidating again on the hand of a few all-powerful individuals.

Payment processing services such as PayPal and Visa absolutely should be common carriers, because of the great power they can have over people by denying them financial services. The SubscribeStar controversy being a good example.

Republicans were banned IRL from a public parade in Portland, OR.

It is characteristic of the people now banned by Patreon - and their followers - to stylize themselves as martyrs. However, they are just unwelcome, like someone ranting loudly at a bar. There is nothing going on that threatens anyone's life.

A company doesn't want the business of him and his followers. That's it.

Your argument 'not the right to be heard' does not apply in the context of shutting down users with controversial ideas on sites like Patreon and Reddit because visitors have ample space to not seek out the quiet 'ranting racist'. I have yet to experience people being thrown out of a bar, restaurant, or business because their conversation included racist or controversial topics.

Generally though the people in the ranter’s vicinity get up and walk away.

Unless you believe corporations have any sort of obligation to the society they function within.

I think ultimately I'm against censoring out 'alt-right' ideas and the like because we've already taken a pro-business approach to freedom like some of the commenters are suggesting (a more allowable use of the right to refuse service to anyone). This resulted in segregation by race and by gender, leading to unfair discrimination which ultimately resulted in a constitutional amendment disallowing it.

Since then, the right of a company to deny services to someone hasn't been exercised as much.

What happens if we begin to censor content on online platforms more readily, or in a more general sense censor ("curate") more readily? As happened in the 1950s, people will be unfairly excluded. Will we have to add another entry to the whitelist (another constitutional amendment) for this category of people then blindly continue in support of censorship? Will we be happy to create segregated circles where a group with superior technology clearly profits? In this case, I'm pretty obviously in support of allowing controversial content because freedom of expression is, in our culture, rightly (imo) regarded as important, discrimination has yielded poor outcomes in the past, and it is arrogant to think that we have figured out exactly what is acceptable to censor and to start actively censoring on that basis.

I'm strongly in the "my house, my rules" camp. Don't like my moderation? Fine, host your own party.

Some argue that today's large services have a greater responsibility. Because they serve a public good. In some cases approaching a public utility. So perhaps freedom of speech concerns outweigh "house rules" (freedom of association).

Per the paradox of tolerance, I have zero sympathy for the agitators (trolls), regardless of flavor, so am the wrong person to adjudicate.

I point out the (widespread) contradiction, because the other rights are often ignored.

Although we all agree that this is legal to do (and nobody is thinking about taking Patreon to court), there is a second, more subtle social issue at play. Taking it to the extreme, if you live in a company town earning company scrip to spend at the company store, when the company decides that they don't like what you're doing in their place of business (organizing a union, perhaps), getting kicked out is functionally identical to a governmental sanction. As a result, even though the law permits companies to engage in heavy-handed social hedge-trimming, in some cases it can have the same problems as the government censorship that we have already agreed is bad. It would be going too far to say that corporations have an inalienable moral right to police whatever they control.

That is, we want businesses to have the right to choose who to do business with, unless we disagree with their reasons for not wanting to do business with someone.

Those laws don't exist because we don't agree with their reasons. They exist to protect people who have been categorically repressed for hundreds of years.

What if they register their ideology as a religion? Iirc it is a protected class in US so they cannot be banned due to it.

However people getting banned like this rarely are inventive enough to figure out ways to fight back.

The thing about the law is that it doesn't operate like code. You can't just cast<Religion>(ideology) and expect it to work within the framework of law, because the law is (luckily) interpreted by people who expect it to be taken advantage of by the unscrupulous.

Otherwise, literally every corporation would already have registered themselves as a religion just to avoid paying taxes.

Maybe a case could be made for political affiliation under "creed," since there appears to be no specific legal definition for that[1], although the consensus seems to be centered around religious belief.

In any case, since one can (and many people do) change their political affiliations often, I would expect such a law to meet with some extreme legal challenges at the very least, because it seems like such an obvious attempt to game the system, particularly since "discrimination against a political group" is pretty much the purpose of other political groups.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_group

[1]https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/8686/what-is-a-creed...

I personally think there's something fundamentally undemocratic about barring discrimination against political ideology because that comes too close to interfering with freedom of speech or freedom of association or the exercise of politics itself.

Although not the historical reason, a far simpler one is: you can change your mind and ideas but can't change your race.

In addition, it is that behavior and not that belief that gets the racist removed from the premises. You can choose to be quiet about your ideas where they are not welcome, but you can't choose to not be your race where it is not welcome.

So we can ban people for/against atheism because it's an idea one could theoretically change their minds on?

Atheism is literally the opposite of religion.

Did you know that the incident in question is about this Sargon fellow attacking white nationalists? So to further kill the analogy, you kicked a fellow out of your pub for saying mean things things against racism while at another pub.

But then a world in which race was a choice would be so different from our own that one would wonder whether racial discrimination would even exist, or what "black" would even mean.

I am not saying I agree or disagree with it, but perhaps things are not as hypothetical as you believe.

* Yes, "society" here works through state. But without a reasonably wide consensus in the society, a norm cannot be effectively imposed: most people would break it and be sure that everyone around won't mind. (Manufacturing such a consent, if it's not yet there, is another business.)

Reminds me a little of the whole Parental Advisory thing with rock music or Spotify's decisions around violent artists. How outraged should we be that artists that say very questionable things are on Spotify and Youtube? Should songs about murder, rape or glorifying breaking the law be allowed on those platforms? Or where should the companies draw the line?

EDIT: Source: https://corporate.walmart.com/_news_/news-archive/2008/04/29...

>MUSIC: Wal-Mart does not carry music that has the “parental advisory” label which warns parents about explicit lyrics. We carry some "edited" versions of music that have been provided by the artist or the music label. Wal-Mart does not edit music. Our role is simply to provide music selections that we believe our customers want to buy.

Patreon, Youtube and Facebook all purport to be free and open platforms except for very well-defined exceptions like speech that endangers others.

People can and should hold them accountable to their own policies. If they want to become moderated sites that allow only a subset of content/ideas then by all means, they should be allowed to do so, but they should no longer be considered open platforms and their policies should outline what content they allow.

Walmart's policy was very clear and they actually followed it.

Maybe you didn't riot over it. I thought it was blatantly censorious.

If you want a service with more inclusive tolerance levels, sign up for such a service (and not Youtube), or found such a service (and try to make it viable).

The problem is, of course, centralization. Network effects make a few successful services kings of a market, so "everybody" wants to be represented there. This puts such a service in a position of significant power. People actually vote them into that position of power by their continued patronage; this is their free choice, even if not always well thought-out choice.

So, if you want less powerful centralized players, use decentralized services where you can, help fund, build, and spread them. Think Facebook vs Mastodon. (Unfortunately, in music space, there's no decentralized analog to Spotify or Bandcamp.) Internet itself is such a decentralized platform, just not on the application / business level. Good thing we still have it, at least.

I am saying essentially that; there should be a law that forces Patreon and other companies (those oligarchic payment processors, Google, Facebook, twitter, etc) which basically qualify as utility companies to allow people on their platform, unless those people abuse(d) those platforms for severe unlawful activities (crimes). Or they should lose their service provider status and all those "safe harbor" exceptions that come with it, e.g. DMCA safe harbor.

Same as the your local electricity provider (probably a monopoly in your area; tho you can always run a generator aka your "soapbox" pendant all those comments in here are talking about :p) should not be allowed to stop serving you because you wrote a blog ranting about their bad customer service.

I am also saying: Companies are not people, and (their) money is not speech, and I'm all for limiting companies' "free speech" in that their "free speech" cannot discriminate other people. Companies are already limited that way anyway to a degree, be it anti-discrimination legislation when it comes to the work place or the current state of "protected classes" on which they may not base a refusal of service.

That's very clearly not true at all. Just a dozen or so major companies or orgs can work together to shut you out of having nearly any reach at all. For practical purposes, you'll have zero reach. Any combined small group of them can easily be enough to make your life online dramatically more difficult.

They can get you at the domain registration (oligopoly + mixture of cartel behavior). Oh, well, you have no right to a domain registration.

They can get you at the ISP level (oligopoly). Oh, well, you have no right to Internet access.

They can get you at the discovery level. Oh, well, Google (monopoly), Facebook (monopoly), Twitter, Reddit, et al. don't owe you any discovery access.

They can get you at the hosting level. Oh, well, nobody owes you access to any sort of hosting, from Azure or AWS to Wordpress or Tumblr.

They can get you at the network transit level. If just a few ISPs or large backbone operators in the US blacklist your site from their customers, few will be able to see you. Again for practical purposes, you're dead in that market.

Google as one example has openly bragged about their potential to conspire with other malevolent entities to tightly control expression/speech. They know their position and exactly how they can abuse it to their political or ideological bias.

In the age of inherently subjective 'hate speech' as The Devil that must be stopped at any and all costs, none of this is far fetched in the least. It's going to get a lot worse yet; the topics covered by 'hate speech' blockades will get far more extensive in the coming years. The enemies of free speech have been wildly emboldened by their successes and the lack of push-back. The entire West is going to end up with the equivalent of a less restrictive Chinese firewall, and that's where liberal Democracy is guaranteed to die.

Yep. And it's happened in the past. That's why so many tinfoil hat types ended up on shortwave radio, or sticking flyers to lampposts.

Desperate people desperately trying to get a message out, with no means to do so.

But that isn’t the point. Should we not even be allowed to discuss a hostile immigration policy because it “sounds crazy”? That in and of itself sounds crazy to me.

Which correct mediums? And which correct payment processors, while we’re on the subject?

The argument that you’re being “forced” to hear arguments you don’t want to hear is equally as farcical. Just, like, turn off your screen man.

We're talking about mobs that hound people online, instead of simply not clicking on the content they don't like.

So you tunred it on its head exactly, directly after complaining about dishonest argumentation.

And anyone who thinks clicking a button is "honest argumentation", is really just betraying how they're using a phrase they heard others take seriously. You don't even know what it is. This thread is littered with the proof of those unable and unwilling to argue, and they honestly think they can force this, heh.

Also, nobody censors. A distributor decided not to distribute the stuff anymore.

This idea begets that we have agreed to outsource what is and isn’t “allowed” to be said in the public space (and these are public spaces) to private corporations that absolutely do have their own agenda and objectives. Are we as a society ready to do that? Who watches the Watchmen?

To use a closer analogy, Tumblr recently banned "adult content", including nudity. This affected friends of mine. Is that censorship?

Ok, so why can Patreon not decide what is and is not an acceptable use of its platform?

Even when there is overwhelming international, corporate, and government support, internet censorship has not been effective. Look at the resiliency of the pirate bay and darknet markets.

This made a lot of sense when I was a kid. Since that time, communication has become incredibly centralized - whether it’s the platform (eg, YT), or the infrastructure to keep it running (eg, Cloudflare.)

Today, if one or two private enterprises decide they want to eliminate your voice, you’re effectively barred from the public square. You can’t roll your own cloud flare.

When private resources so entirely consume our public interactions, the old stand-by of “well, private companies can do what they want...” seems to engage in a form of category error. It may be a private organization, but it’s dominating a public good.

You don't need a fancy Cloudflare proxy to get a message out there. A static site is easy to host and there are thousands of sites/services to choose from.

You can still stand on a soapbox, you can post a link on a wide variety of message boards, write an opinion piece for a newspaper, etc.

Plenty of times throughout history, oligopolists and monopolists have been forced to follow common-carriage rules, whether by actual regulation or the threat thereof.

Also, you are conflating the First Amendment, a legal instrument, with the ideas of freedom of speech and open discourse. The First Amendment bars the government from itself censoring people. It does not say that the government cannot require non-discrimination on the part of private companies.

That's never been part of any conversation about free speech. (Even the broader non 1st amendment version). And it doesn't make sense. You can always take cash or check. The post office doesn't discriminate.

However, moral imperatives are not things we should legislate as they aren't universal, and "the government cannot regulate me" is a far cry from what some are calling for now, which is " the government must regulate you".

Also, just because something could be private doesn't mean it should be run for privatised gain. I'm pretty sure the UK post office was recently privatised.

But that has no bearing on financial services (like square or visa, which are all contract carriers) or hosting companies (also contract carriers), or other things like that. ISPs are the one exception which might fit the bill of a common carrier.

I partially agree. Freedom of speech isn't the right to be heard by those who don't want to hear you, but it most certainly is the right to be heard by those who do want to hear you.

To put it another way: Alice wants to say something. Bob wants to hear what Alice has to say. Cedric, a would-be censor, wants to prevent Alice getting her message out to Bob. Censorship is whenever Cedric wins, and freedom of speech is whenever Cedric fails.

And as an example, "Paradox of Tolerance" was widely used to justify firing Damore (e.g. Zunger's criticism of the memo just about boiled down to "he's intolerant and bad, because he's bad and intolerant, and us, the tolerant and good people should punch him in the kisser". Even though whatever problems there are with the memo, one has to go on a hunt for something, anything to be offended, to find intolerance as a visible problem with it. But if you scream about the paradox loud enough, it (almost) makes you look like you're in the right...

NB: not expressing any opinions on memo's correctness.

They aren't intolerant, they're just anti-left.

Excellent intellectual ammunition.

This is not just about free speech and freedom of association. It's about anti-competitive practices in the marketplaces. People who have done what you suggest discover a coordinated effort to de-platform which includes things like making it impossible to use theoretically neutral infrastructure, like CAs or DNS or routing or payment systems or monetization. Meanwhile "approved" competitors see no such bar. In the United States this is conspiracy to restrain trade. When a person can only make a living if the platforms approve of the content, the platform is picking winners and losers in the market. These are outrageously unfair business practices.