The spirit of your complaint here is "there should be a reasonably easy path for me to widely distribute my message without getting the rug pulled out from under me". There is exactly one way to distribute your message, and whether it is easy or hard is up to you. That is: satisfy the requirements of every platform you build on top of, and fill in the rest by creating your own infrastructure and audience.

I believe in common spaces, and like I said I am glad that if you drill down far enough you will find distributed* protocols that aren't opinionated about your content. Feel free to start there and build an ecosystem and audience - that is how the world discovers who wants to participate in a particular kind of dialogue.

The * is that of course central censorship exists at the Telecom and government levels. I (directly) support distributed private protocols to ensure that people can choose to find the information they want as easily as possible. But doing so emphatically doesn't and shouldn't guarantee you an audience.

The spirit of your complaint here is "there should be a reasonably easy path for me to widely distribute my message without getting the rug pulled out from under me".

There is a reasonably easy path to do exactly that. But it has dependencies, and certain people are manipulating these dependencies in any which way they can to control online discourse. And you're cheering them on, pretending that not publishing someone's article is exactly the same as closing someone's bank account on hearsay.

And yet I am 100% sure that if someone started following you around and pressuring companies to close your accounts and stop any dealings with you, you would immediately decry it as grave injustice and invent some reason why it's "different".

>I believe in common spaces

In hypothetical ones, that don't exist.

>Feel free to start there and build an ecosystem and audience - that is how the world discovers who wants to participate in a particular kind of dialogue.

So, what exactly in your arguments binds them, preventing you from saying the exact same things about this hypothetical zero-layer public space when it gets sabotaged? Nothing, really. You will just say "you're still free to build another one, somehow".

When PayPal start banning clients based on their activity outside of monetary transactions, PayPal effectively condemns certain points of view. Which might sound sensible at first, if the views are questionable, but it also implies that not banning an account is a way of endorsing the holder. And just like that, you arrive at the conclusion that PayPal and other service providers are responsible for the moral quality of all their clients, and not just can but have to ban clients who transgress. How's that for freedom of association?

PayPal publicly condemned certain points of view long before Gab: prohibiting "the promotion of hate, violence, racial intolerance or the financial exploitation of a crime" was part of the TOS when Gab signed up, as was the fact that the definition of those things was up to PayPal. They don't seem to share you're opinion that non-fraudulent monetary transactions are the only aspect of their business.

And as far as anyone having to ban clients who transgress, when did that happen? As we've tossed around in other threads, you can loudly and proudly make not-banning the core of your business. But you're expressing a personal priority for diverse expression (or at least the type of expression you make welcome, c.f. Gab's Pepe) that other people might not share, or might not prioritize the same way you do. Freedom of association means you make your choice and other people make theirs.

[1] https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/

This attempt to frame deplatforming as something enacted by concerned stakeholders is out of touch with reality. It usually involves partisan press, activist organizations and whipped-up online crowds with no stake in the platform they're trying to affect. It takes about 10 seconds of web searching to find all three in Gab's case. @deplatfromhare and so on.

>Never mind when a platform manager like Matt Prince [1] goes out of his way to make it clear he is autocratically representing his own judgement, after grappling with the very real moral trade-offs involved in excluding someone.

Why are you switching attention to a completely different incident all of a sudden? Are you claiming that this single example disproves many other instances of deplatforming occur due to blatantly obvious external pressure?

Speaking of Cloudflare:

https://www.thedailybeast.com/cloudflare-and-its-free-speech...

"Tech companies have cut ties with the extremist-friendly website Gab, but digital security company Cloudflare appears to be standing by the site."

It is absolutely laughable to say there is no bullying going on when the press is fully of articles that point fingers and draw spurious correlations.

>PayPal publicly condemned certain points of view long before Gab: prohibiting "the promotion of hate, violence, racial intolerance or the financial exploitation of a crime" was part of the TOS when Gab signed up, as was the fact that the definition of those things was up to PayPal.

My post above talks specifically about "banning clients based on their activity outside of monetary transactions". PayPal TOS apply only to such transactions:

  You may not use the PayPal service for activities that [...] relate to transactions 
  involving [...] the promotion of hate, violence

If this isn't about the owner, then it is about the website. So the question is whether hosting hateful content of your users does by itself constitute "promotion of hate". Considering that PayPal does business with Cloudflare the answer seems to be a resounding "no".

By all accounts, this does not look like a consistent application of TOS.

>Freedom of association means you make your choice and other people make theirs.

That is not what it means and what you described here is not freedom, but law of the jungle.

Like I said above, the only context in which deplatformers engage in this faux-libertarianism is after they've gotten their way. The moment the tactic stops working or applies to them, they switch back to moralistic arguments or demands for regulation.

Moreover, this argument was initially used to advocate for deletion of specific content on normal websites. Then it was used for banning individuals from large communication platforms. Now the exact same thing is being said about simultaneous multi-company service termination for a messaging platform with hundreds of thousands of users. As if those things are logically equivalent scenarios.

It it not a consistent position, but mere convenient nonsense.

For someone claiming the moral high ground enfranchising speech, you seem pretty free basing arguments on knowing that certain voices should be ignored. Fortunately, we can skip the boring discussion about the character of different activist groups because it's the listener's opinion that matters -- in this case, the platforms who thought these folks (or their ideas) were worth listening to.

> Speaking of Cloudflare...

I brought up Prince as evidence that platform managers are making their own decisions, not being bullied by crowds. Framing them as victims belittles their agency, ignores their responsibility, and perpetuates this BS chain of victimhood that is required by your arguments in order to make deplatforming look like a conspiracy rather than a big swath of society trying to spend less time with a few jerks.

And of course Cloudflare (or FreeDNS) have the same right to provide services to Gab that others did to deny it. Digressing for a second, I'm personally glad that Prince et al. hold a steeper standard for cutting service than Facebook or even PayPal. DDOS'ing is an infringement of freedom of speech in a way that deplatforming isn't, and right now we're all depending on a very few companies like Cloudflare to be the equivalent of a police force that maintains any notion of commons.

> ...By all accounts, this does not look like a consistent application of TOS.

PayPal felt Gab itself was getting paid, through PayPal, to run a platform that promoted hate speech. That's related to the transaction, and related to the TOS. You can disagree with them, and people can post potentially irrelevant screenshots, but both are sideshow.

> the only context in which deplatformers engage in this faux-libertarianism is after they've gotten their way

Yet again, you're resorting to ad-hominem about the long-term behavior of a group you're barely bothering to define. You don't know anything about me outside this conversation. Lots of different people support or are fine with deplatforming, and many of us also care about the quality of the commons on which the deplatformed can continue to exercise their speech.

But instead of yet another conversation about which broadly defined online group says the most dumb things, why don't you put forward a concrete vision of what your definition of free speech is? It seems to me like it involves something like a right to an audience (sincerely, how is that not a right to force people to interact with to you?). Or perhaps some sort of protected class situation, where you want to clearly define the difference between "passively" enforcing TOS and singling someone out (what would that look like?).

Because that is not the correct response to someone who casually describes eight hundred thousand users as "a few jerks". Or someone who smugly dismisses a well-reasoned article by saying the author "beats an ocean with a stick". If you insist on promoting gross misrepresentations of reality, all you will get in response is well-deserved pushback. The ideas and constructive suggestions will flow to people who actually listen.

As for the article, I obviously disagree that it was well reasoned, but I regret implying that the author is foolish. The point of the ocean metaphor is that you can't and shouldn't try to stop people from making their own choices about whom to associate with - which is what you are doing when you say all views are entitled to an audience. I've dug in with you on this thread because I think that "free speech = free audience" is a potentially attractive fallacy that risks degrading both individual rights and tractable notions of free speech.

But at this point it looks like we're done talking to each other, and nobody else cares about this thread. Nuff said.

This sounds simple, until you realise the requirements aren't well-defined, or that the definitions can be changed arbitrarily (and retroactively) by the platforms.

Here is the problem though: The platform of platforms, then, is politics, if we want to keep biology out of the picture.

And the thing with politics these days is, that the state, as a system, is compulsive. I cannot leave the state, I am not free to do so.

In other words, the most underlying platform is not of my choice and therefore it is not as simple as you are making it out to be.

I like your thinking framework and agree with it.

"We don't want your sort on our platform because reasons" ought to be concerning at a much wider level (and not just to the sort that apparently aren't wanted on the platform).

We can all think of things we would ban if we ran hosting providers. We all know there's a line. Why are we pretending there isn't?

"Bigoted messages"? Would that be content that's

* against the law

and/or

* against the upstream AUP/TOS

and/or

* "someone said something that offended someone else"

>> that have gotten people killed

Not wishing to pour more gasoline on the raging fire, but ... source?

As you suggest, they have no individual legal obligation to serve a business that may cause bad press/high risk/whatever. But when you can enough of them pointing in the same direction, it creates the chilling effect-- a business that's technically legal but can't get the services they need. It basically creates am unspoken private regulation well beyond the actual law of the state.

I tend to think the answer might be non-profit or state-run "service providers of last resort" -- charter-bound to provide service for any legal purpose, no matter how distasteful. Not necessarily cheap or slick, but they won't pull your plug because people complain about your content. Such a provider would defang the deplatforming strategy pretty fast.

They can get it, but have to pay for that. Just like the porn industry had to build their own payment providers.

The chilling effect is working as intended. You need something in society to make people find common ground and live in a similar reality. The current US seems like a great example of people not being able to do so. They blame more and more blame other side for their problems. And i wonder if that trend can be reversed before you guys start shooting each other.

Recent developments like social media made and the US TV landscape make it easier than ever to live in your favorite filter bubble. Algorithms getting better and better at giving you what you want to hear. I don't see developments emerging to counteract that.

If de-platforming is bullet we have to bite for society to keep functioning, than so be it. It's still somewhat mild tool you can work around... i take that over government intervention any time.

There are two problems with that argument.

First, it's nowhere near as trivial as you make it sound. A one man shop could potentially build and maintain a custom forum service himself, but trying to create a real-world ready payment processing infrastructure from scratch is going to mean a team of tens of specialists.

The porn industry was able to solve it because it was a big, industry-wide problem that left a lot of money on the table-- a need big enough to create a market for specialists.

Second, it may not be possible to bypass every firm that presents a deplatforming risk. The porn industry may have avoided rejection by the mainstream gateway providers, but they're still dependent on retaining good relationsips with Visa and Mastercard at the end of the day. I'd think those guys are the nuclear option for deplatforming-- no matter who you line up to take your payments, if you can't accept 90% of the cards on the market, you're not going to be able to monetize effectively.

Yes, but this is how the free market works. That my $.25 artisanal dog cupcake business can't get the services it needs at the price I can afford doesn't raise complaints.

But when we replace dog cupcakes with Nazi chat rooms, suddenly we need the government to step in and subsidize a business which the market has shown is not worth it. In economic terms, the "distaste" of a client is an externality, and there is an increase in price associated with that externality. If the company can't afford it that's just the market at work. So the government providing a platform like this is just the government subsidizing business with negative externalities that the free market was correct tly pricing. It's like subsidies for strip mining or fracking or rhino poaching. But this is something you support in this case.

It's odd to me.

> I tend to think the answer might be non-profit or state-run "service providers of last resort" -- charter-bound to provide service for any legal purpose, no matter how distasteful.

And what if my distateful venture needs redis or windows 10 or a spanner like distributed database, or whatever other service your unflashy system doesn't provide?

Then either I can't get off the ground anyway, or you require that the government service maintain feature parity with all the others, neither of which seems viable.

If you can't get services you need at any price isn't that when competition authorities [ought to] start investigating?

Given the unwelcome resurgence of the right worldwide, that day may come sooner than you think.

Only then did businesses stop associating with those people, because the government was implicitly threatening them.

It was exactly the government's interference that caused the deplatforming of potential leftists during the red scare.

Please cite examples of these widespread small scale, grassroots anti-leftist incidents.

When we start throwing that word around, along with describing groups as "far right" (or indeed "far left") when they've started getting more votes than the [previously] mainstream groupings, we appear have a problem with nomenclature.[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hessian_state_election,_2018 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bavarian_state_election,_2018 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_presidential_election,_... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austrian_legislative_election,...

There are four levels of power (kind of) => government, employer, social, individual. Whenever you're in an argument, assume that the other side is advocating for the top level to enforce something so you can call them oppresive, and claim that you're advocating for the bottom level (and that that level should be free to do as it likes).

Nothing in this article mentions passing a law and he even mentions several times that it's within their rights. It's therefore clearly discussing level 3 and 4 (trying to effect cultural change at the level of the individual. For you to weigh in as if he's arguing for passing an insane freedom of speech is disingenuous.

I think you've inadvertently overlooked how the 3 parent replies above you were discussing hypotheticals. In other words, each reply tried to elaborate what the alternate universes of free/censored speech might look like:

- evrydayhustling's hypothetical: "What would it look like for an "anti-deplatforming" initiative to succeed? [...]"

- im3w1l's hypothetical: "What reason is there to assume those platform platforms will not get kicked off the platform [...]"

- amputect's hypothetical: "What's the alternative to "build your own platforms" though. Are you willing to compel Stripe by threat of force [...]"

Commenters can bring up hypothetical laws or attempt to predict hypothetical outcomes even though the article itself doesn't mention creating a new law.

(It's also possible that the middle reply in the chain of hypotheticals by im3w1l was misinterpreted as a call for a government law even though he doesn't explicitly state it. Sometimes people read between the lines and misconstrue the commenter's intent. It does seem like im3w1l's statement of "These people are not arguing in good faith" is implying that the mechanisms of the free market and free association wouldn't work for marginalized ideas. Therefore, it's not unreasonable to assume that the alternate universe he's thinking of that would work would be a government law that prevents de-platforming.)

That is, power that is wielded over you by corporations even though they're not your employer because you essentially have to do business with them (Visa and MasterCard come to mind - they're essential infrastructure to the point where it really should just be a function of government, but isn't for historical reasons)

"come a little closer mouse so that I may better catch you and eat you..."

Why on earth should society bend over backwards to aid spoiled deliberate attention-seekers when there are 7 billion other people who are actually trying to resolve problems that need our actual attention.

These "malingerers" are using up valuable medical staff's time they could be spending upon actually ill patients!

The issue, as I'm reading the parent comment, is that it's beginning to appear that no one is willing to stand up and say "look, it's not that I support this or that view, it's just that, well, if people are going to spout nonsense it might as well be here where can all observe them", because doing so would be so against current social normal it would be irresponsible.

Why should we assume that until someone gets kicked off the platform pltaform platforms?

Platform platforms intended exclusively for uses commonly considered undesirable have been successful in the past, see namecentral.