Despite HN regulations I am aware that you are arguing in bad faith and don’t care at all about the facts of the case. But I think it’s important to get the facts out there for other people.

Once again: eBay’s policy is not to ban harmful ideas generally or anything that might be morally icky. They have a specific policy against racist items, in any form. That includes the blatant racism in some of Dr. Suess’s books. The policy is reasonable and not that complicated. If you want to buy something racist, there are other websites.

eBay is not trying to police everything, they just don’t want racist stuff on their website. That is their perogative as a business and is hardly a meaningful threat to free speech even considering eBay’s market share.

Part of the reason this preposterous “debate” keeps raging is that people keep inappropriately elevating the issues to abstractions, since the specifics of the case are really not controversial:

- Just as YouTube and Twitch do not allow pornography, eBay does not allow racism. That does not mean that porn and racism are banned under the 1st Amendment. Likewise there’s plenty of stuff on YouTube that’s more immoral than any legal pornography, but YouTube never claimed to ban everything bad. They just don’t want to be associated with porn. Likewise, eBay doesn’t want to be associated with racism.

- Some of Dr. Seuss’s children’s books have bigoted depictions of nonwhites, including cartoons black people that resemble “darky iconography,” which anyone in good faith would agree are deeply racist.

- Since eBay doesn’t allow racist items (and had good reason to be concerned about racists rushing to buy discontinued Dr. Seuss books), it banned the items from its store.

Nobody seriously thinks that YouTube is censoring the porn industry. It is true is that the “buy racist crap to own the libs” industry is much smaller than porn and probably can’t easily survive without eBay’s help. I fail to see how that’s eBay’s problem.