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.

Also, we probably would kick people out of public commons for yelling vile opinions on the grounds of disturbing the peace. if you simply must shout such things, you can apply to do a formal protest- a thing anyone on the web can effectively accomplish by making their own web page.

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://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

And also see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasel_word and then notice how HN is positively gushing with super-couched "arguments", in any thread. "I'm not entirely sure it would be impossible to theorize that"... it's like the only subjects many people are comfortable with talking about with any level of attention or intellectuality are those that are purely technical, i.e. where person doesn't need to have position.

With anything that can't be decided by reading specs or benchmarks, wishy-washy stuff comes out, and doesn't get defended either. It just keeps getting posted, and calling it out may get downvoted -- as if showing something to mean nothing is worse than writing something that means nothing [0] -- but no actual defense, at most one half-assed attempt and when that is refuted, no conceding of a point either.. rinse, repeat.

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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZ2AH7u_9Xo&t=1m10s

> the ways in which we were turning politics into economics, and allowing our faculty of reason to be denigrated into a faculty of calculation

... which might lead a person to think that being in the majority makes them right, or that an imaginary Venn diagram describes all sorts of real people, or that truth is decided by votes, or that the wisdom with which someone votes makes a quantum leap when they reach 500 karma. Among other things.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18759743

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?

There are however plenty of people who are disturbed by the systematic way certain minorities attack and destroy speech about ideas that are, objectively, commonplace and popular (just look at opinion polls).

Even the top voted comment on this whole thread talks about disquiet over censorship whilst ending by saying they're a left leaning socialist. Of course, this statement should not be necessary to make, but it is - it's a form of "don't shoot I'm on your side".

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.

It's the height of dishonesty to purposely label people as fascists when they are not. It's also dishonest if you know someone isn't a fascist, but you go along with the the narrative because it's easier. At best, the case with Sargon of Akkad is that Patreon was honestly fooled.

I don't think Patreon should be obligated to host projects it doesn't agree with

Then Patreon and PayPal should bill themselves as something other than a "payment platform."

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.

You'd have a very different POV if it were people of your own tribe(s) who were being shut down in this fashion. (Which was pretty much the analogous case in the 60's when Berkeley was at the center of the Free Speech movement.) Then you would be singing the Free Speech message loud and clear. The reason why the concept of the right of Free Speech exists, is so that people who have power can't simply shut down everyone else.

Beware what political tools you let people have. One day, they may be turned against your side.

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.

If anyone disagreeing with you is automatically a “snowflake”, you’re the one with a sensitivity problem.

Just something to think about.

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

We have seen this over and over. Any organisation that provides some sort of useful service will inevitably end up hiring activist employees that take extreme positions and threaten to cause as much chaos as they can if they don't get their way with regards to eliminating conservative customers.

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.

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out — Because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out — Because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out — Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me — and there was no one left to speak for me.

-- Martin Niemoeller

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.

At the level of abstraction you're working on, you could say the same thing about LGBTQ or any other minority.

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.

These platforms are supposed to do two things:

- blog/media hosting, both storage and web distribution

- Handling regulatory and coding requirements for accepting payments, via a trustworthy single payee... so that subscribers aren't having to provide credit card numbers to every random content creator out there

These platforms are violating expectations by going beyond solving those problems and trying to be a nanny. We don't need nannies on the internet.

They aren't even doing a good job of being a neutral nanny. On patreon, there is a ton of objectionable content depending on your point of view and morality. (On youtube, there is a ton of garbage content, though not much adult/erotic material because it's mostly banned.) If either platform cared about the perception of their platforms being a place for content appropriate for a formal dinner party, they wouldn't operate as they do now.

In the case of Patreon, if someone doesn't like a patreon creator's content, they don't have to subscribe to it. Patreon content is discoverable, but it's not self-promoted by Patreon, so people aren't generally going to see much that they find objectionable. For platforms like youtube, which use subscriptions/histories to recommend other videos unsolicited, there needs to be a better tagging system so visitors can blacklist tags that will trigger them. Other than that, these platforms are not, and should not pretend to be, in the nanny business. And everyone needs to have a thick enough skin that they can encounter a summary, title, or first few seconds of a video they find offensive and simply laugh it off as internet idiots being idiots, and navigate elsewhere rather than pretending they have moral justification to complain to platforms about content that is neither violence-promoting nor defamatory.

[1] https://www.patreon.com/intlantifadefence

[2] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/antifa-dom...

[3] https://www.patreon.com/chapotraphouse

[4] https://www.reddit.com/r/ChapoTrapHouse/comments/9k14nf/why_...

[5] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_violence

How do you defend them employing someone that is a public supporter of the domestic terrorist organization antifa?

[6] http://www.returnofkings.com/125075/patreon-employee-aaron-r...

Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.

But if say ISPs start blocking non-beige content, then freedom of speech is dead. Shouldn't there be a minimum internet infrastructure where people can say whatever they want? Aren't CDNs part of that infrastructure?

The reality is no, there is enough privatized centralization in payment and networks that certain companies can choose not to do business with someone, based on otherwise legal speech, and effectively stifle that speech.

Maybe that’s better than the alternative, which is that companies are forced to carry speech they don’t agree with or even find “repulsive”.

However there is a concept of “public forum” and at some point it is incumbent on private enterprises controlling key internet infrastructure like DNS, IP allocation, peering, DDoS, and even payments at some point, to become neutral carriers which cannot and should not interfere with providing services based on content.

This to me is an even more fundamental neutrality than what is referred to as “network neutrality” because we’re talking about blocking service entirely not just prioritizing packets for higher paying customers.

This is a critical stance to take now, not 10 years from now after the frog is boiled. I think the average entitled American has absolutely no clue how quickly a regime can become repressive, and how much repression is going on out there. We tip toe around talking about Daily Stormer when countries today are inspecting packets to cart people off to new age gulags.

Nazis are a pathetic boogeyman to justify this kind of censorship. Laying this kind of groundwork to kick out a “radical anti-feminist” I personally hope that Patreon users rebel against that.

And I'll free admit, just so the purists can get it out of the way, that I think there are types of speech that should not be socially tolerated. Hate speech shouldn't get public protection. Shun me for it if you like.

From these two things, I find that businesses refusing to do business with the likes of Stormfront, or this "radical anti-feminist", or whatever, is a very good proxy for social standards. Why? Because like I said, business is amoral. It doesn't care about hate speech. But when that speech is so repulsive that businesses worry about the general public, their other customers, punishing them for supporting it, then that's a good point to say "No, this is not acceptable".

And to be clear, I'm drawing a line about the freedom to not do business with someone - not a law to punish speech. I'm not saying throw them in jail for speaking in hate. I'm saying that it's not good to require business to provide a platform for their hate.

And yet this case shows the exact opposite, and they are hemorrhaging users and money for it.

> I'm saying that it's not good to require business to provide a platform for their hate.

The Overton window really has shifted too far if you consider the things Sargon of Akkad says as hate speech.

Patreon fucked up the execution. Reddit has been throwing out more and more undesirables and it's been working out well for them.

Businesses are doing things because their owners want to punish certain opinions, regardless of how popular they are. Visa and Mastercard are using their monopoly power as payment processors to interfere in elections and punish people who say certain things. And people on Hacker News are fine with this, because muh you should just make your own banking infrastructure! Free Market.

Now, think about how much we want the people who convinced you of it to have an unrestricted platform.

Jordan Peterson was the one who, by boycotting Patreon in response to their behavior, created the association which led to this misunderstanding. He tied his leaving to this event directly.

I seems to me that Peterson no longer felt safe putting his revenue stream in the hands of Patreon, because of what he saw as unfair and improper political bias which could one day disrupt his own finances.

That to me is a lot more worrisome than someone being wrong on the Internet.

Yes, but it's funny that we're now deliberating conflating 'people' with 'private corporations', a conflation that folks on the left vociferously condemned when it came to Citizens United.

I think we should look at ourselves a bit more carefully in the mirror - are private corporations supposed to be held to a higher standard or not? Especially when they have de facto monopolistic control over platforms that everyone uses.

For example, it's all very well to say that Google is a private corporation free to censor you if it wishes, until you're a content creator that is de facto knocked off the air because of Content ID, without any of the due process that copyright law actually demands.

Put in another context, should we get rid of net neutrality because Comcast ought to have the right to decide what content goes over its pipes?

Meanwhile, a different platform (of which many exist) is trivial to switch to. The reason that some platforms are more popular than others is precisely because they are tailored to appeal to the mainstream without extreme content pushing people off.

NN governs as though the service is a public utility. There are some businesses that are crucial for upholding FoS (they could be equated to soapboxes). Patreon is not crucial for protecting FoS, nor is YouTube.

> Especially when they have de facto monopolistic control

The important determinant is that it is not de jure.

> left vociferously condemned

The left condemned it because it was pluralist, and the left agreed with majoritarian ideologies (hence: democrats).

Furthermore, things were radically different back then. The Democrats originally supported the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the Republicans rose as the opposition. All that tu quoque proves is that times and people change.

In more practical terms: a private corporation consists of human beings, who may not want to deal with certain ideologies.

Not only should we not get rid of net neutrality, we should enshrine it as a principle further up the protocol stack.

No, we should ban monopolies for one thing, and 2) the whole point of net neutrality is to bring the idea of "common carrier" to the internet. If you provide the transit pathways, you shouldn't get to play favorites.

I'll make an analogy: if you own a public stage, you should have every right to deny access to Nazis who want to use it to publicly promote their viewpoint. However, if you own a train system (which also happens to be a government-granted monopoly and highly regulated as such), you should have no right to restrict the Nazis' travel, as long as they follow the rules and don't create a disturbance; they should be able to buy train tickets just like anyone else. (Now if they attack people on the train, or try to make public speeches on them or in the stations, that's different.)

What is it then?

PS I have to add that the "loudness" of some point of view in the social media is the willingness of people to hear or see that point of view.

Yeah.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18750037

> They, however, seem to want to be where their ideas are not wanted[1].

How are mobs following people they don't like around, seeking to destroy their livelihoods not much worse than "vote brigading"?

And on what planet aren't those mobs using vote brigading on top of that?

Then this limited "freedom of speech", a provincial americanism based on a historical accident (the first amendment), is not the full freedom of speech the philosophers of enlightenment, artists, activists, etc., described.

>If people don't like what you have to say, or how you are saying it, they are free to walk away

In this case, they weren't free to walk away, they were thrown out, regardless of whether what was said was popular or not.

If we allow those with internet platforms to decide what's ok to be written, we're regressing before the enlightenment.

It doesn't matter if someone can "create their own platform". A right to free speech should include the ability to talk in the popular platforms of the day, the "marketplace of ideas". Nobody should be guaranteed an audience, but nobody should be denied a place to speak and potentially gather one.

(Of course big private interests have all the space they want in their own owned platforms, from TV channels and websites, to press and social media -- for them there's no "make your own website to spew your shit", they already have all of them -- and they get to pick who gets to participate in them).

Also note that just because the wind today is pro-progressive, and people you like (like the Patreon guy) get to dictate who says what and what's not to be said on their properties, it doesn't mean it will always be this way. The liberal twenties in Germany were followed by Nazism. The 60's and early 70's in the US were followed by Reagan. Consider freedom of speech practices that should apply now and later, when progressives don't have the same clout.

Can you point to other countries that have broader freedom of speech than the US?

All, or almost all, Western European countries have freedom of speech and freedom of the press in their law and/or constitution.

In any case, all of these are beside the point. The point wasn't about what "freedom of speech" laws the state deemed ok to give, but what freedom of speech is (or should be).

It's very difficult to imagine Bell Telephone (in their 100% monopoly days I mean) feeling responsible for what people discuss on their wires, or feeling a need to deny (say) pornographers service so that its other customers wouldn't feel tainted. Or Visa likewise today -- it's understood that other people will use the same plastic to pay for things you morally disapprove of, just as they could use cash. But it's positioned as a neutral carrier, and nobody cares (I think).

Regarding Visa being neutral, I think there are cases where this is actually not true: https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2018/08/23/david-horowitz-vis.... Obviously, excuse the source, but I believe the core idea is still fact.

So, censorship is being exercised in areas even where you'd expect neutral carriers. I would call that worrying.

I have an unpopular opinion. I believe people should be able to fly nazi and confederate flags on their private property. (Even if their private property overlooks yours.) I believe football players should be able to kneel during the national anthem.

And I believe private companies should be able to exercise their freedom of Association rights based on their beliefs or their bottom line.

All of these are just people having opinions. If you don't like their opinions, don't associate with them. That's the freedom that you have. I don't think any of this is a problem. Certainly none of it is censorship. The man flying a nazi or confederate flag in his yard alongside his JEB Stuart statue is not censoring MLK by refusing to put up an MLK statue as well.

The people who want an MLK statue should go put the MLK statue someplace else. The people tossed from Patreon should go raise money elsewhere. They're all perfectly free to do so.

At the risk of starting a tangent, this doesn't work when it comes to business. Businesses (or any relationship of dependency) should not be allowed to have "an opinion" because before long it becomes collusion and shunning.

How well did "no, no, you have the freedom to go somewhere else" work for blacks just wanting to buy a hamburger in America pre-1968? We had to pass laws telling businesses to get the fuck over themselves and indeed, it's still challenged to this day when gays try to buy wedding cakes.

If you don't like mandatory arbitration clauses in every single contract you sign, you literally can't do business anywhere. Everything from your job to your car purchase has them. If you don't like being subjected to credit checks, you literally cannot procure the utilities required by law to make your dwelling inhabitable-- all utilities run credit or make it prohibitively expensive to go without.

It's an imbalance of power. You can't just "go somewhere else" when you depend on the service being offered or provided, that you are denied for arbitrary reasons.

When you need consideration for membership, there really is just no way you can claim that to be non-private. That includes Patreon, it's private. It's their rules. Full stop. It's like adwords, if you want to use it, you have to start giving Google more consideration. Normally to use the public parts of Google, you don't need to give any consideration at all. (Of course, Google takes the tracking information from you anyway with their public facing services, but they don't ask you to actively give them any consideration.)

No, you have two totally different opinions here.

Football players are not private individuals on their own private land. They're basically employees of a sort, so they're subject to the whims of those who employ them. I happen to agree with you, but I don't own a football team, so my opinion isn't important here. If I work at a company where I'd get fired for kneeling during the national anthem, I'm either going to not kneel, or start looking for a new job.

Now, if a guy or gal is invited to perform on a military base during a national holiday commemoration, then sure, they should be compelled not to kneel. But if we're talking about things happening on private property as a part of a private gathering, those people can do whatever they please.

If the owners have the guts, let them all fire the football players. That's their right. Either way, the only input we should have on the matter is to watch the football game, or to walk away and not watch it.

A performer on a military base is constitutionally protected from punishment for kneeling during the national anthem, because that base is public and they're acting as a citizen. A member of the military may have other requirements, I'm not really sure.

A professional (as opposed to high school or college, where this argument doesn't work) football player is playing on private property in the employ of a private citizen. That citizen could (and does) have the right to fine their employee for kneeling during the anthem. This isn't true for HS or college players who, by and large, are not acting under a private citizen owner, but are normally playing under the purview of a publicly funded school.

To put it succinctly:

>And they are taking these actions on private property.

Yes, and that private property is someone else's (in this case regulated by the NFL) who can set rules as they see fit.

Right.

Which is why I wrote:

>If the owners have the guts, let them all fire the football players...

But if the owners don't fire them, then whatever. Not our business. Watch them, or don't watch them. That's your choice. Nothing more.

My choice is to not watch them, but that's only because I think American football is a stupid sport, and that watching sports is, in general, a mindless waste of time.

I politely disagree. You're right in that it's not government censorship, but it is certainly cultural/corporate censorship, and my thesis is that this is a growing movement.

Yes, nothing is legally wrong here, or even morally wrong. Nobody is doing anything wrong. I do agree with you there. But zooming out and looking at the picture as a whole, I believe there is a growing tendency to silence ideas we don't like. I don't believe this movement will stop once it reaches some arbitrary boundary defined by law or private property. Yes, I am citing the slippery slope argument because I think it's actually applicable here.

The libertarian idea of "well, it's private property so it's not an issue" is an extremely simplistic way of looking at a much larger cultural phenomena that I think is a growing problem.

There may be a day when the deciding of what is acceptable or not does not stop at your private property line, so citing the first amendment and plugging your ears afterwards doesn't really work as a counterargument to what I'm saying.

Do you think this is actually an unpopular opinion, or just one not well represented by the two dominant national political parties in America? You mention elsewhere that you are from small-town Wisconsin. I grew up there also (Ladysmith) and now live in a small town in Vermont. I feel like this attitude is still quite common in rural America.

The downside of this framework is that it's hard to justify things like the Civil Rights movement (which I presume you agree was a mostly a positive?). How does one draw a line between "restaurants must serve customers regardless of race" and "businesses can choose not to offer services to racists"? Or does one give up on the first as well, and hope that the force of capitalism is strong enough to fill the gap?

I believe the key difference is skin color is innate and being an asshole is not, you don't get to choose to be black, you do choose to be an asshole though.

I think that the shift in popularity for gay rights mirrors the shift in acceptance that homosexual feelings are more innate than chosen.

Of the 11 federally protected classes, religion stands out as the only one that isn't innate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_group

Incidentally California prohibits employment discrimination on the basis of political activities or affiliations, which is a step further than the federal requirement: https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/california-employmen...

Personally... I'm not religious, I was raised an atheist, I don't like religion, and I don't really think it should be protected, but I sorta kinda understand why it is, religion seems "special."

Veteran status is also protected under employment discrimination law, and military service isn't an innate attribute, however, its in the best interest for a country to protect those who have served it, especially those who were drafted.

Family status is protected under housing discrimination law, and having a ton of kids isn't innate, but some can say that the urge to have children is actually innate. (Though as a person who never felt an urge to reproduce, I have a hard time actually understanding this)

So yeah... we aren't 100% consistent.

I'd say being a veteran is, once you're a veteran you cannot change that about yourself. You could decide to not become a veteran, but you can't unveteran yourself.

Bingo!

You're free not to allow blacks into your night club. And a lot of night clubs and country clubs do just that. A large number of my friends and I won't be patronizing your establishment either, but you're free to do as you like with your business.

The people doing this are advocating for violent ideologies, that have as their foundation extreme racism, including the oppression of minorities and violence against them, literally to the level of genocide.

They don't stop at just putting up flags. They organize, march and perpetrate violent attacks. They invade subcultures and infiltrate their ideologies into them. They plan for the creation of a fascist white ethnostate. None of this is exaggeration on my part.

How do you propose we stop this tide of hate-fueled ideology? The "marketplace of ideas" approach does not work, they simply use the exposure to further spread their viewpoints, feeding on the controversy.

How can we fight these ideologies, if not by exposing them and deplatforming them, and constantly keeping them on the back foot?

Heh, well I hope so. But that recent NYTimes story[0] about how mass shootings used guns and ammo bought with a credit card makes me unsure about that. I'd have thought using cash vs credit was more or less interchangeable, and either the person should be allowed to buy the firearms or not. But given the focus on how it was bought, makes me think there's some movement towards expecting Visa and the like to not be simply neutral facilitators of transactions.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/12/24/business/deal...

For me that's flipping the bozo bit for that individual. It's not "fascism" or "trump" that we should be afraid of. It's the mob rule.

Oh, people should really be concerned about fascism. It's just not coming from the groups outed trying to bring it (what should be obvious, outed groups do not succeed).

But there are people pushing hard for individual-erasing collectivism, explicitly labeling people in ethnics belief and sex, and suppressing every unaligned idea to the point where it's not viable for the people that have them to even speak.

(A late edit: I don't think Pathernon is on this group. They did nothing wrong, they just happen to be in a place where no move was a good one.)

If you don't have anything to fear from Trump, that's nice for you, but given that he's openly calling for me and people dear to me to have our civil rights revoked, it's pretty shitty of you to tell me that I shouldn't be afraid of him.

By new kinds business I mean that lots of internet companies seem to be awkwardly half-way between neutral infrastructure (like Windows, and your water company) and being publications (which of course have an editorial line).

Hellfire would rain down on any Network (Visa, MC, Amex, Discover) who thought about refusing to process firearm purchases. The NRA, any republican, and liberals like myself who support fundamental rights would be rightly pissed that a hard-to-avoid service such as the Visa network was making a decision on what I can or cannot do with my money. Because the minute you start making those decisions, it's a slippery sloap.

Their business prints them money, so why would they want to kick the hornets net? This is why I'm extremely weary of anyone who declares that Cash is Dead, or the future is Credit/Debit cards

https://www.creditcards.com/credit-card-news/card-payment-gu...

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/19/business/banks-gun-sales....

https://nypost.com/2018/06/11/gun-businesses-scrambling-afte...

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/could-credit-card-companie...

I'm not sure, but I can offer two hypothesizes that aren't mutually exclusive.

1) Gun owners have been marginalized on social media and their hellfire is going unnoticed on alternative platforms, or simply isn't promoted by algorithmic timelines.

2) Gun owners are already predisposed to purchasing guns with cash, for privacy reasons, so many don't feel particularly inconvenienced by this development.

But that is exactly what is happening. Visa is saying to Patreon - don't let people give money to XYZ persons via your platform.

It will be really interesting to see if 2019 brings a change in the outrage that is currently directed at public facing platforms over their content policies to the actual architects of many of those decisions, which are Visa/MC and a handful of advertising brokers.

We can argue about the role of individual platforms, but Visa/MC in particular have a cast iron, long term monopoly with much stronger effects on the public than any national government does. Their editorial policies should be under huge public scrutiny.

The lines had to announce the subscriber's name and the recordings could be required to be taken down if found defamatory.

When 900 numbers with paid recordings, like messages from celebrities or gambling advice, became available, they had to announce their fee structures upfront before people were connected to the paid programming.

This is how oppression operates. First it's, "Well, we'd live and let live, but we can't afford the consequences if we serve you." Then it will be, "We can't afford the consequences if we're at all associated with you." Then it will be, "We can't afford the consequences if we don't loudly support the 'right' things." Finally, it will become, "We can't afford the consequences if we don't turn you in."

I'd argue this is the natural selection of ideas at work. If you don't like it, raise hell, and gather enough people to make a difference, that's what everyone's done since it became an option to do so.

If you can't harness the momentum perhaps it means that your idea just isn't cut out for life on the grand stage of society. Life after all, is not fair.

When it comes to control of information, I don't think it's only the government that we have to worry about.

stop trying to construe it as some great 'issue of our time'.

This is the great issue of our time.

I'd argue this is the natural selection of ideas at work.

No, that would be those ideas getting downvotes and no one listening to them. That would be the circumstance where no one wants to fund them. Instead, people want to fund them, but a few powerful people want to throw roadbocks in their way. This is a powerful organization that controls financial transactions pulling the strings to suppress ideas they don't like.

If you can't harness the momentum perhaps it means that your idea just isn't cut out for life on the grand stage of society

The ideas have momentum. It's that large organizations are pulling the strings and pulling the plug. It would be as you say, if individuals were pulling the funding. Instead, it's a big company not letting many, many individuals fund as they would like.

Your talking point is just another example of this: People in media trying to sell the idea that this is "the marketplace of ideas in action." No. It's the marketplace of ideas being manipulated.

(And if you want to see the long arc of history bend in the right way, the wrong thing to do is to manipulate the marketplace of ideas. That is precisely what gives ammunition to the toxic extremists and the flim flam artists.)

Bell in its monopoly days was a common carrier [0], regulated by law to treat all phone lines equally.

> Or Visa likewise today -- it's understood that other people will use the same plastic to pay for things you morally disapprove of, just as they could use cash. But it's positioned as a neutral carrier, and nobody cares (I think).

Visa and Mastercard are not common carriers - they can and do discriminate.

One of the weirdest ironies in this debate is that the people Patreon is ending business relationships with tend to be libertarian/conservative types who are generally skeptical of government regulation of business. And yet what they really seem to want is regulation of Patreon, Twitter [1], Cloudflare [2], etc as common carriers.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_carrier

1: https://qz.com/1381708/twitter-finally-banned-alt-right-cons...

2: https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/

The recipe for boiling the frog in introducing totalitarianism is the same: First you go after the least popular people and get tacit approval. Then you extend that to someone else, then someone else. Eventually, you get to a point where everyone is at least a little leery of speaking up. Then you turn it up just a little more. Rinse and repeat.

This is where we are now. We are in the middle of the process above. It doesn't matter how idealistic the people who are implementing it. Control thought and speech, and you lock in absolute power, and absolute power corrupts. All of the worst totalitarian regimes throughout history had idealistic, flowery sounding language to justify their actions. All of them.

Isn't businesses deciding what they want exactly less regulation?

The line they are walking is pretty thin at Patreon but my image of the company is mostly supporting general content creators in the non-ideological spectrum of content. If these people do not fit with their point of view (specified in general in the terms) they may simply be polishing up their image to what they want to look like. It is their choice as they throw away some, at this point still marginal, income. Though as stated in the article, the people leaving could use it as a rallying point and maybe even get out better in the end (subscriber/monetary wise).

For the little guy there is no practical difference between a government service and a homogeneous oligopoly. I believe that given enough time these services would get regulated as infrastructure and hence banned from refusing customers, just that our legal framework is too rigid to adapt to the fast pace of technological progress.

There has always been a realm of discourse that society agrees upon and that we use to set the boundaries of conversation, just a few decades ago anti-Semitism and racism were allowed and now it isn't, overall this is a good thing.

There are more platforms than ever available to you if you want to express your fringe ideas, each of the platforms has the right to ban you if it goes against what they stand for. Everyone who uses the platforms understands the risks, I don't understand where all this pearl clutching is coming from.

But there aren't. It's an illusion of diversity.

They're all owned or being bought up by the same centralized handful of outfits-turned-conglomerates that have always controlled the means of distribution. Haven't you noticed the flurry of mergers (successful or not) in the last 10-15 years?

Indeed. A good example is how much trouble Snowden had in finding newspapers willing to publish him. Same goes for Wikileaks.

If you want to talk about a "marketplace of ideas," this is just an example of how it works in practice. Alex Jones or users of /r/FatPeopleHate etc. are 100% legally allowed to spread their ideas in most countries and therefore still participate in this "marketplace". However, consumers themselves find certain actions and ideas repulsive and last year's young and vulnerable males have perhaps grown up a little, so websites are trying to read the market and get ahead of the curve before a smart competitor can pick up those consumers by advertising "we don't allow content like that on this platform, but you can find it on Patreon if you really want."

If the concerns about Patreon's censorship that we're seeing in this thread were really as valid as their prevalence should indicate then Reddit banning subs like /r/FatPeopleHate and /r/CoonTown might have led to Reddit's downfall a long time ago (like how very many redditors predicted), and Voat.co would be a flowering bastion of ideas and content from people drawn to its promise of unadulterated free speech. Instead Voat is a second-rate, hostile finge community while Reddit is only gaining prominence as a website. That doesn't seem to be changing anytime soon.

The same thing would happen to any "alternative" Patreon, so for very many powerful members of this "anti-feminist"/"new right"/"Intellectual Dark Web" I think they might see this as writing on the wall for them and their entire movement. Maybe what they're afraid of in the long run is that their ideas simply don't stand up to scrutiny and without access to a sufficiently large mainstream community where the law of averages would budget them a steady stream of converts they would steadily lose members and just fizzle out on some forgotten corner of the internet.

When society gets to a point that it decides internet access is a basic necessity, and not a luxury that can be shut off by a company when a random middle manager decides.

To use your example, DS is a terrible thing. But its electric provider will never shut off its juice for being too controversial.

Its water will not be cut off because of its views.

Its heating oil fuel will keep being delivered, because the oil distributor hasn't decided to impose its leaders' morals on others, and punish those it disagrees with by withholding its service.

As long as the internet is "optional," then the vast majority and chattering masses won't complain about a small group of people cutting off smaller groups of people.

I can't wrap my brain around the notion of the water company shutting off an extremist group's taps.

There are different modes: I do not have to give someone I strongly dislike the freedom to preach at my home. However, if I have a media content distribution business, and allow creators freedom to create their own message I should also tolerate content that I personally dislike; otherwise I risk my business to morph from content distribution into society manipulation. "I disapprove of what you say, but will defend your right to say it". Patreon is wrong. My 2c.

They want you to treat them at equal in the world of debate because that's how their views are legitimized and given power. I find it honestly disturbing that people are more willing to defend the 'ironic' people calling for the death of their enemies than the minorities trying to get them to stop.

I think we can, and indeed should argue against such ideas. The goal is not to convince a zealot that his views are wrong, but rather convince the majority of those on the sidelines that those ideas are stupid and will lead to no good. If the ideas are outlandish, arguing against them on merits is easier, not harder. As long as the vast majority of the society sees those ideas as crazy, arguing them stays pretty harmless.

And what is the alternative to arguing on merits? It is tempting to be able to silence unpopular views, but that can backfire -- tomorrow control could change and someone might deny us the ability to speak. "I know the world is flat" needs a better answer than "No! It is round, end of discussion".

If arguing against those beliefs worked then by your own arguments we should see the amount of believers dwindling over time. Yet as they gain exposure even when people attempt to debate them in good faith, their numbers grow.

How do you explain this?

So to me, your comment comes across as “But what about those cases where what GP said is true?”

But can you be more specific? What consequences can you name, especially in the US? I'm not aware of there being almost anything in the US, except that they might not be allowed into some schools, which barely even counts as a punishment.

And yet the idea proliferates wildly.

But Bredow fell foul of the law because she reneged on agreements with her former spouse dating back to November 2016 to have the boy immunised."

Sounds like an edge case that's more about custody than legal rules over vaccination.

The consequences for people not vaccinating their kids goes beyond just belief. Even then in America we're incredibly lax on those people despite the fact that it seems to be growing movement fueled by quackery.

DD spending a lot of time being personally nice to Klansmen might swing a few of them back the other way, but I suspect making their recruitment harder in the first place might be the more scalable and less risky approach.

I also think that Daryl Davis is one man on a mission. If others were perhaps similarly motivated maybe more progress could be made.

Those who argue in bad faith will spread viral speech resistant to good faith counterarguments. To assume that these people are just missing the correct information is to assume that we are dealing with purely rational minds. No amount of reasoning will change a bad-faith argument.

I think a lot of the discussion about free speech values need to consider the context of our changing world. The rhetorical battlefield of the modern world is no longer as we know it. Perhaps it made more sense in the past to simply fight ideas with ideas, since schools of thought were more centralized and ideas spread slowly, getting filtered and curated along the way. Today, there is instantaneous spreading of ideas to every corner of the world. The things people hear about are not the best ideas, but rather the most transmittable ideas. Our society has spent billions of dollars cultivating the mind virus industry, and they have discovered very powerful techniques for spreading dangerous pathogens. Facts alone do not cure a mind infected with emotionally-rooted lies. We need stronger immune systems.

And while education is indeed one part of the picture, having more opportunities for empathy and having stronger cultural standards are another. Restricting this kind of speech sets the standard that some ideas are not compatible with a modern society. However, I agree that this method is flawed: it creates the perception of persecution and martyrdom, and uncomfortably concentrates power. I think modern progressive thinking needs to focus more on a sort of empathetic education rather than going all in on an antagonistic shaming approach.

This "marketplace of ideas" and the idea that fascism can be argued away is demonstrably not working. Trying to engage a True Believer in debate simply lets them use the exposure to spread their ideology, they and their adherents simply feed on the controversy.

That's why a large segment of the alt-right run around daring people to "debate" them, because they know all exposure is good exposure, when it comes to the segment they're targeting.

By debating fascists, you implicitly give credence to the notion that their ideology is valid and worthy of civil discourse, when it is in fact the direct opposite of free speech and freedom for all.

"I disapprove of what you say but will do my level best to ensure it's profitable for you and your copycats to keep saying it in a more and more attention-seekingly extreme manner" sounds suspiciously like the net result is society manipulation of a different sort. Ultimately I think private organizations have a right to have the time, effort and money they invest in growing their platform's reach decoupled from the change in the public profile of evil.

Patreon want to prevent the expression of certain thoughts. For example, they are against "negative generalizations, of people based on their race". However, negative generalisations are sometimes true. For example the homicide rate in Japan is much lower than in Jamaica; from this it follows that Jamaicans are on average more homicidal than Japanese. That's a negative generalisation. It's also true.

I wouldn't mind that Patreon are censorious, if there were lots of alternatives. But that brings me to your other point:

> Centralization is the real evil, here.

This is the real problem, plus the fact that internet-based services tend to become centralised, due to network effects, high fixed costs and low variable costs.

I'm not sure what the solution is. Encouraging decentralisation seems to me a bit like trying to make water run uphill: you can do it, but it's an effort and as soon as you stop, the water just runs back downhill.

Good luck with that. The Visa MasterCard cartel will not allow a Patreon competitor with different standards to use their payment infrastructure and will use their connections to get any competitor kicked off of other payment processors.

It’s been two weeks and SubscribeStar still don’t have a replacement for the eight payment processors that dropped them all at once after they took on Carl Benjamin.

Patreon would have backed down by now if that was an option.

It’s all about the payment processors, as you’ll figure out pretty quickly if you read this transcript of a call between the head of Patreon’s Censorship team and one of their creators.

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

Not only that, she was formerly a PayPal employee and had been working at Patreon for only a few months. Reading between the lines, it seems likely that Patreon was being told by PayPal that they had to fall in line with PayPal's censorship or lose PayPal (and thus mainstream credit card) processing.

To me, a generalization is where you infer that because a general fact exists (e.g. the homicide rate) there is consequently a more specific fact about each member of a group. I feel like you have stopped short of actually making a generalization, or are leaving it ambiguous as to whether you have made one. If the homicide rate implies something about each Jamaican, what does it imply? I find the equivocation over such matters more viscerally irritating than the racism itself.

That is not true. The fact you presented might be true, but the statement that "Jamaicans are on average more homicidal than Japanese" is not identical to the fact about homicide rates.

Your statement implies that those two groups of people are somehow differing in temperament such that one has more violent tendencies than the other.

The reality is that there are many complicating factors, and your statement removes enough of those that it no longer is true.

For example, a similar but more obviously false statement from the same vein: "It is a fact that americans have more total car accidents than the ancient greeks. Therefore, the americans are worse drivers than the ancient greeks" (or similarly "more americans own cars and have no accidents than ancient greeks, so it follows americans are better drivers). The obvious confounding factor there is the fact that ancient greece had no cars, but it follows an identical pattern to your statement. It starts with a simple fact, and then creates a phrase which neatly avoids all confounding factors and has a negative implication that relates to the fact, but ignores how complex reality is.

I think that if you, in seriousness, made a statement like your example, you can and should be banned from platforms. You're mis-using facts to represent one culture as more violent than another, and implying that it's a trait of the people, not a much more complicated result of economic and legal differences. It's an incredibly racist and insidious thing to say.

I don't buy that, today many say things like "Men are on average more prone to violence than women" without intending it in an essentialist way. So then why would "Jamaicans are on average more prone to violence than Japanese" have to be essentialist?

The interesting part is that few people take the same stance on both of these statements, people thinking the first is fine rarely accepts the second and vice versa. Seems like this argument is more about each side shutting down ideas they are uncomfortable with.

However, I think that it is possible to contextualize fact-based-generalizations to remove sexist/racism from them. If you say 'society conditions men to be less emotionally open, thus men end up being more violent, see these psych studies', that's all well and good. On a similar note, if you say 'Jamaicans on average grow up in higher poverty with worse education, and more end up involved in crime', that contextualizes it to show that you are not speaking about the nature of the people, but rather about specific situations and facts.

A final factor you're ignoring is that there's always a much broader social context through which your generalization is interpreted. "Black fathers are lazy" is a more racist generalization than "white fathers are lazy" because the first has racist context associated with it, and the second has much less of such a context. This context may be global or regional, though with the dominance of american media, that context is basically global at this point.

On a similar note, anything to do with a specific people or race needs more explicit context because there's so much racist ambient context.

> Seems like this argument is more about each side shutting down ideas they are uncomfortable with.

I am not okay with anyone stopping you from providing facts and ideas about crime in different societies, just trying to stop you from generalizing in such a way that implies one race is inferior to another. This isn't a matter of discomfort per-se, but rather a matter of us having already seen the end of the slippery slopes such talk, when weaponized as rhetoric and internalized, leads to.

There is no meaningful semantic difference between the statements "Jamaicans are on average more homicidal than Japanese" and "Jamaicans have a higher homicide rate than the Japanese". Your outrage is exactly the kind of behaviour that so many in this thread are decrying: the OP said something that is indisputably real and you reacted by saying "you can and should be banned from platforms".

You are literally trying to expel someone from the internet for saying something true, because you feel a statement of statistical fact implies things you don't like or can't accept (but which weren't actually stated anyway).

You're mis-using facts to represent one culture as more violent than another, and implying that it's a trait of the people, not a much more complicated result of economic and legal differences. It's an incredibly racist and insidious thing to say.

Maybe it's easier on you if the example only discusses white people?

If I said the homicide rate amongst Americans is much higher than amongst the Swiss, I'd be making a negative but true generalisation about Americans (it's 5.35 vs 0.54 murders per 100,000 inhabitants). What is it that causes such a difference in rate? Is it economic differences? Surely not. Legal differences? Perhaps, but there are plenty of guns in Switzerland and violence is equally illegal in both countries. If anything the USA has much harsher punishments so it stands to reason it should have a lower rate.

If you insist on refusing to consider the huge bundle of intuitively defined and often nameless attributes we collectively call "culture" then not only are you wilfully blinding yourself, but you are finding yourself literally attacking and trying to silence people who are less intellectually limited. This sort of behaviour is not a good thing to practice.

I would not be fine with the similar, but different phrase "American people are more homicidal than the swiss", assuming no further context.

One of those is clearly meant to discuss a fact. The other is meant to play up nationalistic tensions.

I know negative generalizations can be supported by fact. I'm fine with those facts being presented and discussed, I'm just not fine with the facts being obscured and rephrased such that it serves more to create a climate of racism and nationalism.

Context and phrasing do matter, especially when it comes to hateful and divisive speech.

It doesn't need to be a moral distinction. When negative statements are made neutrally, discussion goes much better than when they are made pejoratively. This entire site, if not the entire internet, is evidence of that.

Let's start by agreeing that "Americans" and "American people" are equivalent, at least when discussing statistical facts about populations. Then the two sentences can be rewritten as:

"the homicide rate amongst the American people is much higher than amongst the Swiss"

and

"American people are more homicidal than the swiss"

or taking out the nouns:

"the X rate amongst Y is much higher than amongst the Z"

vs

"Y is more X than Z"

which I am 100% sure, if put to people in a neutral poll, would be considered the same.

But I'm also mystified as to the wider goal. TheDong admits the two constructions are similar, yet his reaction is extreme - one is fine and the other triggers calls for banning people completely, labels of "hateful and divisive" and so on. That kind of unpredictable and over the top behaviour triggered by almost non-existent differences in phrasing is negative to Hacker News, and clearly violates the various guidelines about reading what people say in good faith, let alone the one about reacting to the strongest possible interpretation!

Given that TheDong knows how similar they are, one must wonder what the purpose of treating them so differently is.

In fairness, that was actually DS's fault. They went and said "everyone else has banned us, but cloudflare hasn't. Cloudflare agree with what we stand for".

Cloudflares CEO responded by saying "It would be an objectivly bad thing for the world if I used my position as CEO of cloudflare to censor information and opinions. However, if DS's public standpoint is that if I'm not against them I must be with them, then I'm /definitely/ against them".

I think that's reasonable enough, it's pretty cheeky for DS to attempt to usurp cloudflares good name, and totally appropriate for cloudflare to push them under a bus as a response.

>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 wrote a long version of an answer to this, but it started to ramble a lot. Short version: once someone has 50% of the planet as a customer base, as facebook does, they're not a private company any more, they're a public utility. Even with a much smaller userbase, a company could be acting like a public utility in some countries. We should drop regulation and auditing on them like a tonne of bricks, same as we do other de-facto monopolies like the tax department. If companies don't want that, they should work to generate a marketplace of options for customers.

Thanks, that's a really interesting take on the problem, and I tend to agree. It seems that once something becomes infrastructure (however that would be defined...either by your 50% rule or something more nuanced) it becomes heavily regulated, or at least governed by the principals of net neutrality.

We generally expect provider/customer relationships to be in good faith, and the generally expect free speech to happen in good faith, aka "I'm not relying on dirty tricks to persuade people." DS dropped their end, so I would feel no obligation to hold up my end.

I would oppose banning what they are saying in general, but I think it's entirely reasonable to no longer provide any services to them once they misuse the provider/customer relationship.

This isn't about content moderation to manage complaints. This is about protecting your company image specifically as a company that doesn't take sides.

DS tried to claim that the company was taking a side. CEO broke the relationship because of that.

If the CEO got complaints, and DS had said nothing about Cloudflare, and the company chose to drop the customer, then you'd have a point, but that's not what happened.

> the world handing them the reigns.

Nobody is handing anyone the reigns. Patreon didn't even exist a few years ago, and now we're debating whether or not free speech is in peril because someone was banned from it. It's the same thing with people who get incensed over twitter bans... who cares? These are just arbitrary business... these things just don't really matter.

Agreed.

And the govt (US and EU) can break them up whenever they they attain market monopoly. Or governments (every other one) can decide they've had enough with arbitrary content control by foreigners and ban their service within their borders.

Which is fine, really. I dont b%^h about FB and friends kicking someone out of their service. I expect the enlightened not to b^&h when countries ban services they like.

The Internet as we knew it in the 90s is dead. Time to get over it.

FB, Twitter and Patreon are not the internet of the 90s. The internet as we knew it in the 90s is exactly the same today as it was back then and there were plenty of people receiving subjectively applied bans on various PHPb forums.

That should be:

The Internet as we knew it in the 90s is dead. Time to revive it.

Having more foundational internet infrastructure and services controlled by the government (which IS bound by freedom of speech rules) would also solve this issue.

But the ironic thing here, is that most of the right-leaning people complaining about being kicked off platforms, would oppose doing this.

They also oppose private platforms being told how to behave by the government, as it happens, they're just complaining in this particular case because here that works against them.

I personally "feel" (because I can't really form a hardened ideology around it) that the closer things get to infrastructure, the more neutral they should be. In other words, the more difficult it is to spin up a competitor to Company A, the more Company A should actively work to not censor or shape messages or ideas.

I also agree we cannot enforce decentralization. My hope is that one day, we can see the benefits of it as a people and collectively decide to go that route without coercion of any kind. Wishful thinking, probably =]. That won't stop me from trying to convince others of the benefits, though.

Sure we can, it's called antitrust law.

This is the crux of it. I have a very low opinion of all these people, "anti-feminists" and whatever else, but this sort of drama does illustrate that we have a problem with just a few entities being in a position to stifle the speech of a large number of people. It doesn't seem great, regardless of whether some of its present manifestations appear to be good.

On the flip side, these marginal voices never really had an effective mouthpiece in the past, so maybe the net effect is not significant. But I worry that we will miss opportunities for unique individual expression that the internet, in theory, could provide.

Strange how I never see this argument for allowing people to yell fire in a crowded theater. Perhaps because the people who make these arguments are likely to be harmed in the theater but not by the violent racists. Would they be willing to defend platforming anti-Christian rhetoric in Bangladesh while living there?

Societal rules like "free speech" are not black and white. They are muddy distillations of enlightened self-interest, where each person tries to impose rules on others to reduce their own chances of being harmed. Thus, the European states and the USA all have laws against murder but draw their lines on protected speech differently based on what makes sense in their societies.

The only reason Americans find this so hard to understand is that they are drilled with hero worship for the nation's founders from Kindergarten, much like a North Korean child will be trained to deify the Kim family. The reality is that the documents these men produced were compromises suited to their time, and electoral colleges and 3/5 compromises are not timeless truths for governing.

Why are those different hands? I can accept that you have a different viewpoint, and that you should be free to express it and people should be free to do business with you, without myself choosing to do business with you. That is, accepting Patreon’s action here is a model of accepting different viewpoints with a live-and-let-live attitude, not an opposed alternative to it.

> To me, personally and anecdotally, this seems to be happening with increasing velocity.

It's not, it's just now sometimes biting the right-wing ideologies that historically have for decades directed private and public censorship in every institution of American life (and whose values are still codified in many systems of private and public censorship), so it actually stands out from the expected background more.

That's a very strawman-ish way to discuss matters. I won't deny that a few people think that way, but it is neither the only, nor the strongest counter-argument.

What they absolutely ought not do - and what Patreon might perhaps be held contractually responsible for, here - is to hide the ball and not be transparent about their reasons for removing people.

This recurring theme is now showing up on a regular basis in social media - opaque rules of morality that you have to guess at and appear to be enacted at the platform's whim. If there are groups they don't want on board, they should say so. I suspect they don't because they fear the fragmentation and competition that laying those rules down would encourage.

Patreon dishonestly tried to retroactively apply an amended TOS to justify banning him, after the fact.

This demonstrates that Patreon is a dishonest company that will ban you because they feel like it, and then also try to take the high ground and pretend that they are just following their own rules and or trying to keep people safe, when both of those are not true.

And the NYTimes calling Benjamin's awkward and poorly chosen words "hate speech" is frankly libelous. However, even if they were hate speech, Patreon specifically allows so-called "hate speech", as long as it is not on their site.

As long as people and corporations are motivated solely by profit, you will see this move to "truth in the middle" milquetoast centrist presentation, in order to not offend the advertisers and shareholders.

The people who run the platform?

I appreciate free speech, it allows me to read/hear opposing viewpoints so I can reevaluate what I currently believe so I can make sure I still have confidence in my chosen belief systems.

This is why I will make the time to talk to people of faith different than mine, as well as why I pay attention to news/conversations from other countries, as well as differing political parties in my own country (USA).

I enjoy critical thinking, and it can only be done thoroughly with ample sources of data.

Transcript of a call from Patreon’s Censorship department and a creator. It doesn’t take much reading between the lines to know it’s payment processors.

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

I believe crypto-currencies are, among other things, an attempt to route around the damage of payment processing blockades... And I would expect that to eventually (if not already in reality) include SWIFT and similar fiat currency monitoring systems.

I've been banned from or chosen to leave multiple platforms. The crux of the issue: I have an incurable medical condition that I manage with diet and lifestyle. I've gotten off all the drugs I'm supposed to be on.

I get viciously attacked by others. When I complained to the mods on other platforms (not HN), I have been told their ugly attacks, in clear violation of the rules, are fine and I'm the problem.

I've been told I'm crazy. I've been told I have Munchausen, never mind that Munchausen involves faking illness for attention and my claim is I'm getting healthier. I've had people maliciously suggest that my son, who has the same diagnosis I have, is a product of incest.

I mean, this is ugly stuff. There's zero justification for some of the things that have been said to me.

I've worked hard at trying to figure out how to tread lightly, be very polite and respectful, etc. But, when all is said and done, the unforgivable offense appears to be that I'm a dirt-poor former homemaker who spent several years homeless who claims to have solved a problem that doctors and scientists can't figure out.

So, basically, speaking the truth about my life makes me persona non grata. I can find no way forward for what's an acceptable way to try to talk to people about any of this. Even without trying to promote solutions or make money from it, simply trying to talk to people in public forums about this stuff is essentially a bannable offense in many places.

I've spent years trying to not end up like Semmelweis:* committed to an asylum and dead because of it for trying to say "Hey, world, I think I know something medically useful."

I don't know what the solution is. But every time I see an article about someone being banned from a platform and saying they really don't have other options and this is a threat to their livelihood, etc, I'm extremely sympathetic. I was homeless for years and asking how I can make money online and essentially being told by a lot of people to STFU and GTFO, people who like to see themselves as good and kind and generous and making the world a better place.

This was a potentially life-threatening situation for me. This was tantamount to attempted murder by shunning.

If you have no ability to access income and everyone tries to send you away, when you run out of places to go, you know, death becomes a very real possibility.

I don't have solutions. But I'm reluctant to say "Well, those people just need to behave." What does that even mean if you can find yourself in the same shoes as them for getting healthier and trying to figure out how to discuss that with people?

* https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis

This is likely a factor in why there aren't any serious "politically neutral" competitors to Patreon. Even if you could limit your attack surface in terms of third party services like Cloudflare you couldn't get by without a payment processor.

I think you're asking a good question but I think that because Patreon uses a very human-centric process that starts with "hey, let's have a conversation", it may not be the right place to ask it.

If you are unwilling to have a conversation with your platform, you probably have a problem.

How are Patreon's actions not an example of differing views and "live and let live"?

It's not like Patreon is lobbying to have them exiled from society.

They're simply not doing business with someone whose gimmick alienates a large swath of Patreon's paying, and potential, user base.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akJf2oz5JOM

The "fully decentralized" internet can (does?) already currently exist today alongside our usual youtube/facebook/cloudflare/etc centralized internet. The state of centralization is entirely by user choice, not by force.

Literally the only necessary component for a decentralized internet is net neutrality - that packets are delivered without systematic blocking or throttling on the basis of content. And net neutrality, while in danger, hasn't AFAIK devolved to blocking sites for objectionable content (not yet in the west anyways)

In other words, theres a very clear answer to your conundrum of "at what point do we accept that we have different viewpoints and live and let live?". Regardless of political views or whatever else, your content ought to be routable on the internet. Everything else that we as a society have built on top of that (edge caching, content platforms, delivery systems, heck throw in DNS while we're at it) are unnecessary for a decentralized internet, so if you piss off society and nobody wants to do business with you, maybe it's fine if you're on your own.

Of course, you also argue "there are problems that people have, and things that need to be talked about, but they aren't allowed to say anything about it". That's an understandable position, but should be considered unrelated to the issue of centralized vs decentralized -- I would still not want to argue with some race-baiting troll, even if I hosted my own content instead of uploading it to youtube. I would still ban them, ignore them, blacklist them, or whatever options exist in the decentralized internet.

>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

This isn't really any different from the majority of human history. Private speech - available through a text message or a DM - is still pretty unregulated (and likely will remain that way - for example iMessage is end-to-end encrypted and I suspect any chat service that moderates private messages would run into issues maintaining users). Public speech has always been heavily regulated by those who hold power - whether it's the FCC regulating TV content or being snubbed from the community when you advocate a particularly unsavory opinion at a town gathering.

So then maybe the problem is that more and more of our speech is "public speech" (like a facebook post) and not "private speech" (like a facebook direct message), and hence in practice more and more speech is being censored. I could agree with this. But that's neither a centralization problem nor a censorship problem.

I guess my viewpoint is that decentralized services (accessible enough that they don't require someone to run a server in their basement) can somewhat curtail the problem of cultural censorship. In other words, I think the average person should be able to publish what they want (no matter how stupid) without specialized knowledge and without being censored. That is what I envision.

Will this help the problem with cultural censorship? I really don't know. I just believe in the free exchange of ideas.

That said, and as others have brought up in the discussion, the banking system (Visa et al) engage in censorship fairly often as well...so the problem is certainly not limited to internet.

I guess my post is more of a general observation and complaint than a coherent idea of what should be done. But it's good to at least separate out the parts that aren't really related and argue them as separate pieces =].

I agree, it's an unfortunate consequence of monetary incentive.

There's tons of FOSS self-hosted alternatives for any typical centralized service, all of which could be bundled and idiotproofed and sold to average people. But no one is out there innovating and marketing it and pushing it to the mainstream (if the demand is even there - not likely)

Theres a few attempts, like https://nextcloud.com/devices/ , but I would have never heard of them if I didn't have a specific interest in finding open source alternatives to cloud services.

If there's a fairly cogent set of guidelines I'm fine with it. I realize that it's subjective but we're not idiots and it's THEIR company.

If you went to a friends house and he had a nazi meeting in his basement you wouldn't accept "free speech" as a reason for them to be there - you'd think your friend was a Nazi.

This is a mistake; but don't worry, it's a common mistake. The mistake is to assume that human-constructed ontologies are actually capable of describing the real world, and thus that we can come up with laws or rules that CAN be assiduously (and not selectively) enforced.

This is simply wrong; laws are human constructions made up of language, an imperfect instrument that has no power by itself. There is NO WAY to apply laws without interpretation by the enforcer. It is up to some set of people we designate as agents of the law to decide what the application is.

The same is true of any rule-based system, legal or extra-legal. The rule set by itself can only provide a guide; it requires human judgement to make the rule set work in a particular scenario. Cf. Potter Stewart's famous pronouncement about obscenity: >I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description ["hard-core pornography"], and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.

Since it requires judgement to apply the abstract rule to the particular situation, it means enforcement, by its very nature, must be "selective", and there must always be an arbitrary element to it. That is, judgement, being produced by individuals with their own biases and history which they must necessarily bring to bear on the question, is always questionable.

We have mechanisms to mitigate this problem - mostly precedent and review, i.e., amortizing the problem of individual judgement over several individuals to smooth out the bumps, and recall - the ability to reject individual enforcers. But again, these mechanisms are imperfect (who watches the watchmen, and what makes those watchers any more credible, by the way?).

What's my fucking point? It's that when we begin on this quest, we should recognize our fundamental limit: we CANNOT produce an ideal solution, we are limited by metaphysics itself (the world is larger than we have words to describe). It behooves us to see, then, that the solutions we DO arrive at must be full of compromise, and must recognize all of the ways in which our system is subject to failure.

Your post, then, is a good step along this way. If what we are doing becomes worrisome, good - that worry is a check on whatever authority we have put in place, and your subjective judgements being brought to bear are a way to control the arbitrariness of authority.

But, at the end of the day, all we can really do is worry harder, speak louder, and shape and reshape our institutions, constantly trying to get them to fit the - ever-shifting - landscape of our morality.

See also: Richard Rorty, who was very fond of observing that human society is made up of ugly half-compromises.

Well, that's all well and good; but I do notice that on Hacker News there is a very strong tendency to only report and discuss this kind of thing when it affects "conservative windbags" or people with terrible long-discredited ideas or campaigns against individual women.

It's also well worth discussion "stochastic terrorism", the phenomenon by which injecting hate material into public discussion will eventually cause someone to take it seriously. If you say "carthago delenda est" often enough someone will carry out a mass shooting in Carthage.

In response to accusations of bias, dang has stated something along the lines that people tend to view HN as having a bias contrary to their own, no matter what their own happens to be. From what I've seen that rings true.

If Patreon is a gallery or art market or auction house, and Reddit is a Café, what is Cloudflare? Are they a toll road? Private highway? Something else?

Likening any of those businesses to the closest brick and mortar equivalent is probably futile, but bear with me a moment.

In the real world, businesses generally do business on their own terms. If they don’t own their own property, they lease it, and the municipality they are in zones the land and enforces certain regulations. There might be a couple of other factors, the United States has determined race to not be a valid criteria for whether you allow them into your public facing establishment. Mostly we don’t allow sex segregation, but there are exceptions here too, like with public baths.

A Café owner has an enormous amount of leeway with who they will do business with though. By and large they can ask people to leave, or to not come back so long as the determining factor isn’t discrimination against a protected class. They can compare properties, including landlords, neighborhoods and zoning regulations. If they want to target a particular demographic, it can be as simple as making the menu bilingual or playing a particular kind of music.

Now if someone builds a private road on their own property, that is their own business, but if they build a private road under contract to the city and charge people to use it, that is the city’s business. They can’t tell Nazis not to drive on that road anymore than the city can, assuming this city is in the United States anyway, but a Café owner could absolutely tell those same Nazis in that same city to not come in. Wouldn’t even have to give a reason for it. That’s fine, cafes exist everywhere and if you wanted to open one that catered specifically to Nazis, the law isn’t going to stop you.

I think we have knee jerk reactions when it comes to services like Cloudflare or Patreon disallowing certain people. To be honest, I tried to make a good case for why they should, but my best isn’t a particularly strong legal argument. Cloudflare and Patreon didn’t lay the cables that connect my home to the rest of the Internet, my ISP did, with a charter from my city.

Cloudflare and Patreon are businesses that work better when there is a critical mass of people already using them. They work best at-scale and don’t leave a whole lot of room in the market for competitors, Cloudflare much less so than Patreon, so in a sense they almost feel like utilities or like they should be.

They’re not utilities though, or cafes or galleries or any of that. They are private businesses though, so in that sense they are a lot closer to the Café owner than to your ISP or electric utility or the nearest private tollway. They might be hard to replicate businesses, and the people they are kicking off might find it hard to build a parallel alternative that sticks, but that is life.

That said, I much prefer businesses that are consistent in their policy enforcement practices than ones that aren’t, that is just good business.

Keep in mind that some of those viewpoints are "we live, others get eradicated".

Yes, some of the ideas are objectively bad. That doesn't mean there isn't a growing censorship movement, which incidentally often uses "nazi" lingo as an excuse to selectively silence people.

Also note that I gave a nod to, and firmly believe in, not inciting violence as a core tenet of free speech. Nazis can believe whatever vile shit they want to, as long as they don't act on it.

You can say 'believe whatever you want', but what we've clearly seen is that belief turning into action. This in turn is why platforms are taking action against them.

I think the rise in calling other people Nazis is more a symptom of political polarization than of a resurgence of violent national socialist gangs. To that end, I think the media itself is vastly more culpable than r/the_donald or gab.

Are they organizing and rallying more? Yeah, it seems so. Does censoring them on youtube or patreon keep them from organizing? No...but it does smell of the beginnings of what the communist which hunt was 70 years ago, and the collateral damage that came with it.

When everyone starts banning Nazis, then the answer to "What actually is a Nazi?" becomes "anything I do not like."

The issue of censorship is deeply nuanced (i.e. the paradox of tolerance).

On one hand, there is the problem of "what if the tables are flipped," and how different marginalized groups are treated.

Unfortunately, giving fringe viewpoints platforms and openly debating them actually encourages people to support those viewpoints despite any factual evidence against them. People with fringe viewpoints know this and will often, disingenuously, seek to publicize their views through open debate so they can convert other people into supporters.

He wasn't arguing with white supremacists because he fundamentally disagreed with them. It was infighting between factions. He disagreed with a particular faction's behavior and words.

He was arguing with them because they, using his words, were acting like "white n-words"[1]:

> “I just can’t be bothered with people who chose to treat me like this. It’s really annoying. Like, I — . You’re acting like a bunch of n_____s, just so you know. You act like white n_____s. Exactly how you describe black people acting is the impression I get dealing with the Alt Right. I’m really, I’m just not in the mood to deal with this kind of disrespect.”

> “Look, you carry on, but don’t expect me to then have a debate with one of your f__gots.…Like why would I bother?…Maybe you’re just acting like a n____r, mate? Have you considered that? Do you think white people act like this? White people are meant to be polite and respectful to one another, and you guys can’t even act like white people, it’s really amazing to me.”

[1] https://patreonhq.com/hate-speech-on-patreon-a9026e52c2cf?gi...

I can't get into his brain and determine if he actually opposes genocide or secretly supports it, but from what I've seen thus far it seems he carelessly uses offensive racially charged language but takes exception with those who advocate for genocide.

Just so we're clear, I don't like this guy. I dislike a lot of people who fall well short of being nazis or otherwise advocating for genocide.

If someone constantly spouts Nazi talking points while insisting they're not a Nazi, you need to consider the possibility that they're lying to you.

And it's awfully dangerous to claim that you can't compare someone to the Nazis until and unless they publicly call for large-scale genocide. Modern racists know they can't get away with openly flying the swastika right now. The Nazis themselves started off talking about patriotism, jobs, defense. By the time a fascist group has secured enough power to start calling for open genocide, it's too late. You need to learn the lessons of history enough to recognize those dog-whistles.

The Nazi party was officially formed in 1920 and it was still an extremely fringe group. It was a renaming of the German Workers' Party, a group which had 55 members in 1919 when Hitler joined. That same year they announced that only males of "pure Aryan descent" could become members, and Hitler would give some 31 speeches constantly overtly targeting Jews. By 1921, when the party still just had some 3000 members, the "brownshirts" were officially founded and began to be used to physically attack, disrupt, and otherwise intimidate other parties. By 1923 Hitler literally began an attempted coup which resulted in the death of several police officers along with 16 Nazi members. That failed coup would result in his trial and imprisonment during which time he wrote Mein Kampf.

This is why the appeals to fears of x is the next Hitler are generally unreasonable. Hitler wasn't some devious trickster who suddenly just gradually started 'dog whistling' or hinting at things. He was extremely extreme from his earliest days. He made no secret of it. He literally wrote, and published, a book about it before he started his next rise to power! And the book, again emphasizing written while he was literally in prison, had extremely subtle passages in it such as, "... the nationalization of our masses will succeed only when, aside from all the positive struggle for the soul of our people, their international poisoners are exterminated.. If at the beginning of the war and during the war twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters of the nation had been subjected to poison gas, such as had to be endured in the field by hundreds of thousands of our very best German workers of all classes and professions, then the sacrifice of millions at the front would not have been in vain."

The primary thing I fear is that in our lust to oust the villain from behind his mask, that we ourselves become that which we seek to find.

I have 2 separate points to this.

Firstly, it is inaccurate. In Mein Kampf, Hitler explicitly said he wants to destroy Russia. This was years before he had any power.

Secondly, if you make that rule, you are also banning anyone who talks about "patriotism, jobs, defense" who isn't a Nazi. Such a rule would be a boon for would be censors, who would get to ban everything they don't like and at the same time libel their victims as being Nazis. Their victims, of course, don't get a hearing in the court of public opinion, because they have been effectively silenced. Is that the future you want?

> it's about gaining attention and it seems like k*kes are ruining everything

The reason I'm posting this is because you mentioned that Sargon was arguing with, and insulting, white supremacists. Which, to those who are unfamiliar with Sargon, is not a claim that captures the nuance of the situation. As I said, this spat was infighting between people who are largely in agreement with the content of each other's bigotry.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQ87Wf-0rZg

I fear people are getting the wrong idea by not noticing the full context of my above comments. I hope we've now reached a mutual understanding.

Truthfully, I believe people might take issue with the fact that the distinction you're trying to make is near-meaningless.

He's 90% of the way there. He just isn't using his highly-monetized platform to advocate for genocide. However, he's happy to rub shoulders with, and repeat the talking points of, people who do.

> "White people are meant to be polite and respectful to one another, and you guys can’t even act like white people, it’s really amazing to me."

That sure sounds like someone who espouses a racial ideology to me, even if he hates other people who put on the nazi emblem.

But I think the mistake your comment makes is trying to find an objective definition to judge a subjective behavior, trying to determine whether people should find something antisemitic, regardless of the context. But sometimes context does matter and you can't really control who gets offended at what, or judge what offense is "legitimate" and what isn't, based on some arbitrary criteria.

"Sounds like", "to me". You do advocate and practice the evil you cannot even show others are guilty of. To you they "sound like" people who "might" want this or other things, so let's remove them.

> Mike Peinovich, hosted a poll asking users who their biggest influence was in coming to the alt-right. Multiple respondents named Sargon of Akkad.

I can't find the actual poll in question, but from the SPLC's own analysis, Sargon was mentioned a grand total of 3 times in a thread about what brought people to "the movement" on The Right Stuff forum. I guess that counts as "multiple". Regardless it was a very small sample size collected from an explicitly white nationalist (I assume, I'm just taking SPLC's word for that one) message board. Likely most of the people who still follow Sargon have not gone down the racist rabbit hole and just consider themselves skeptics, but hey they found 3 so...

But this part is downright slanderous, or liable (not sure which, need to watch the Spiderman movie again...)

> And for someone who says he’s not a part of the alt-right, he’s been spending a lot of time with them lately. He’s appeared in videos with alt-right figures like Millennial Woes and Richard Spencer, giving those men a platform to reach his nearly 800,000 subscribers in the process.

While factually true the implication is clearly that he appeared with these figures to promote their ideas, not debate them, which is what actually happened. When paired with Spencer Sargon so vehemently disagreed with him that he kinda made a fool of himself, as at least Spencer remained calm throughout.

I don't really care to defend Sargon and don't watch/listen to most of any of the content he produces. I do follow the tea leaves though, and from what I've gathered, while certainly anti-PC/feminist/social justice/progressive etc., he's no racist.

I mean I could be wrong because as I said I've not listened to much of him, but I'm certainly not going to take the SPLC's word for it.

The SPLC did not say he is a racist, did they? I didn't see that in the text I mentioned, but perhaps they said it elsewhere? If not, then you don't need to take their word for something they didn't say.

They did make an association between him and racism, so let's examine that connection.

This thread exists because of an NYT article about an action by Patreon where Patreon, at https://patreonhq.com/hate-speech-on-patreon-a9026e52c2cf and mentioned elsewhere in this thread - says he "used racial slurs to insult others and specifically linked those slurs with negative generalizations of behavior, in contrast to how people of other races act." You can confirm that those are some pretty racist statements.

Now, I know that some people demur stating that someone is a racist for doing racist things. Are you making that distinction?

Even if you don't think he's a racist for making those comment, it is enough to support the SPLC association of him with racism, yes? If not, why not?

Also I was talking about the quote from GP, in which this association is made on much flimsier and misleading evidence than this incident. The SPLC quote combined a wild extrapolation with a lie of omission that would have completely changed the narrative.

As to your question, it seemed to me he was simply using the alt-right's own language against them in an ironic or sarcastic manner, and does not at all want to be associated with them. You could counter that he simply does not like their tactics/behavior but agrees on principal. Personally I'd need to see more evidence (clips of him speaking with relevant context) to come to that conclusion. As I said I could be wrong, I'm not about to subject myself to hours of political ramblings (which seems to be most of his content) to find out, I just like to not assume people are racist hate mongers because a few news sources say so with subjective tidbits.

But mostly I wanted to point out that the SPLC is not an honest or trustworthy source.

My point is that you said they did. If they actually did not, then it comes across like you are putting words into their mouth. Do you see how this comes across as part of a criticism which says they themselves are over-interpreting the data?

"it seemed to me"

And it seemed to me it was an outright racist statement. Even if somehow it was not, it was definitely an own-goal given the heavy scrutiny he faces. I cannot conceive of how anyone would think those phrases would result in useful, effective, or even interpretable irony or sarcasm.

It's like the justification, after someone has made a horribly racist, bigoted, sexist, or otherwise insensitive statement that "it was only a joke" - where is the humor? Furthermore, people do use "jokes" as a way to test the water; a 'trial balloon'.

Since you don't think he's racist, then in the context of a thread on his seemingly racist statements, would it not be appropriate to address the topic at hand, rather than simply say that you don't think he's a racist?

"I wanted to point out that the SPLC is not an honest or trustworthy source."

Then you should have said so outright. Your previous statement only said that you didn't think there was enough information to conclude that he is a racist. I agree, the SPLC doesn't provide enough information to make that conclusion. But that wasn't their claim, nor did you say anything beyond their analysis of this one situation.

To restate your own words: "I don't really care to defend [the SPLC] and don't watch/listen to most of any of the content [they produce]. I do follow [others who do], and from what I've gathered, while certainly [more sensitive than I am and not immune to error], [they are not unusually dishonest or untrustworthy]."

Well, that is the root of the disagreement (and one of the main issues with this whole fiasco). When you isolate opposing side enough, you can paint them in whatever way you want, because "I cannot understand them, therefore I assume worst interpretation possible" sounds so logical to you . . .

But from the context given in comments I see just how bad the ban is, and how detached from reality are these judgments of Sargon et al. But you will keep shunning him, understand him even less, and make more opponents to progressive cause ...

Streissand effect in full power. It makes me really sad, as I hate modern right wing ideas.

https://friendlyatheist.patheos.com/2018/04/19/the-splc-has-...

"Ayaan Hirsi Ali" ... "is the Somali-born activist who was a victim of faith-based genital mutilation. Her friend, director Theo van Gogh, was murdered by a Muslim extremist who then stuck a knife in van Gogh’s body with a note that said Hirsi Ali was next. She has since written two memoirs and a book offering ways to reform the faith."

She was listed on the Southern Poverty Law Center's "page listing “Anti-Muslim Extremists”." I'm absolutely sure Southern Poverty Law Center was wrong there, similar but even worse than calling Salman Rushdie an anti-Muslim extremist:

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

Do you only take input from organizations which are perfect?

How SPLC characterized Hirsi Ali is a good example of complete wrongness, enough to discredit their real understanding of the topic they purport to be able to judge.

Think about things like the Spanish Inquisition or the Salem Witch Trials for extremely clear examples. These people didn't hate the people they were attacking. They'd just become so deluded in their own self righteousness that they thought they were saving society from immense evil. In reality though that evil existed only in their head. And while Don Quixote may have only swung at windmills, in these cases many people lost their lives for doing no wrong.

---

In reality the paradox of tolerance, as it is used in common rhetoric is completely nonsensical. Popper made an extremely clear distinction between words and violence that people often ignore when appealing to his argument. When a person moves from speech to unprovoked violence, eliminate that individual from society with the greatest of urgency and severity. Until, and after, that point - tolerance thrives without condition.

Well, that wasn't even close to being the case here, was it.

Yes, but they should also be free not to, so we really just need some companies with guts to make a payment processor that to the law, nothing more, and related platforms that do the same thing.

> there's not much anyone can do in the current framework of things other than encourage decentralization

But that is ultimately at odds with "hardened policies that aren't selectively enforced". A giant platform, like paypal + patreon without ANY meddling, or a giant payment processor and a bunch of big platforms that use it, that might not just be cheaper to run, it would solve the issue more or less (until they in turn get kicked off the net by cloudflare or something, but why assume that would happen at this point, seem prematurely pessimistic). Decentralization is like "Linux on the desktop", whereas a payment processor that only respects the law really just requires money and people who can do it.

The evidence says, they do not - hate groups fail at these gives all the time because ultimately they also don't get along with anyone else.

I'd view that as the marketplace of ideas working correctly.

And of course, people who just nilly-willy declare other people unpersons with a broad brush, those aren't hate groups, either, they couln't possibly be projecting.

You might be declaring millions and billions of people as "nobody", and a few ten thousand witch hunters and those who egg them on or belittle them as "everybody". The next few years will show.

> I'd view that as the marketplace of ideas working correctly.

By people being attacked and smeared? That's not what marketplace of ideas means.

So in your mind, would the "marketplace of ideas" be working even better if instead if just kicking people from Patreon, they'd also have their water and electricity turned off? If not, why not? Don't say "it's an utility", this is in the context of your claim nobody could possibly want such an utility. If that were true, it would be like regression to some very medieval understanding of society, if even that.

So in the end a company would be put in front of a choice: either choose what to allow and reject, and become legally responsible for everything that is published; or act as a neutral intermediary and assume no responsibility for the contents. Sounds fair?

The man has hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of footage of his opinions online. He is not racist...at all. And yet here you are confidently and smugly declaring your comfort with his livelihood being taken away on the basis of his racism because the issue could not be simpler in your mind.

... yes?

I can't imagine the world would be better off by engaging even more with racists.

First of all, unless you're a free speech absolutist (who believes that literally nothing supercedes free speech) then recognize and accept that someone, somewhere has to draw a line across a continuum of grey.

So we're already in the morass, whether you like it or not. You're right to worry about this question:

> But then, who decides what's bad?

But in this case, it's Patreon, trying to look out for its own best business interests. It's almost ideal. Since this is their core business they are pretty strongly incentivized to be liberal about what they allow.

You can imagine some kind of net neutrality regulation, but please realize that for it to have any effect it must be enforced. So we're talking about regulators, investigators, rulings, fines, appeals, legal defenses, etc., along with the attendant politics, of course, not to mention, soon you'll have entrenched interests to bog down any reforms or improvements to the system. Maybe as a left-leaning socialist you will be happy to hear about all this but just note that it doesn't resolve the fundamental issue. In the end, there's still a mixture of policy, enforcement, process and precedent deciding what's OK and what's not. Passing a law doesn't solve this issue, it just moves it around and probably makes it more complicated.

> The societal norms are shifting to a place where there are certain topics that are not allowed to be discussed at all

I'm not sure what you're talking about here. Anyway, this case seems to be about vigorous use of the n-word and homophobic slurs, which certainly can be discussed (and, unfortunately, are well accepted and encouraged in certain circles).

Also, keep in mind: moving the line of what is acceptable (whether to something more liberal or more conservative) doesn't change the situation at all. There are people who will test the line, wherever you draw it. In fact, for many, that's the point. They get attention (in their own circles) by testing the line and it's not bad to sometimes get banned as a result.

I agree with most of your comment, but is Patreon really free to make the decision? Assume a hypothetical "free speech absolutist" version of Patreon, who decided they wouldn't bow to outside pressure. It seems likely that that as with their short-lived free-speech-embracing competitors, the outside forces are strong enough that they would soon convince the credit card processors to refuse to continue serving them. Patreon isn't exactly forced to acquiesce, but they would have to decide that it's a hill worth dying on. Do you still view this larger picture as "almost ideal"?

That's easy: whoever owns the platform. If I own the platform, Daily Stormer isn't going to be using it. I don't want to be associated with those morons, so I'm not going to do business with them. If it's my platform and my business, I have every right to refuse to do business with those people.

If you want to be fair and equal and give everyone equal access no matter how vile their viewpoint, then you need to make a government service that doesn't discriminate. But then, you may have a big problem with the voters if the government is funding something the voters don't like. That's the nature of democratic governments: people collectively decide what they, as a nation and society, are going to allocate resources towards. So it's the voters' right to refuse to provide a platform for this unliked minority as well.

>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.

If you feel that way, you have every right to set up your own platform and allow those people access to it. But if you're giving access to literal Nazis, I also have the right to shun you, which I will. If you want to willingly associate with that type of scum, then I'm going to assume that you're cut from the same cloth.

There's lots of payment processors out there too. However, Mastercard and VISA do have an oligopoly, and those deserve a lot more regulation than they currently get, for other reasons than discrimination.

> Someone on our team asked after I announced we were going to terminate the Daily Stormer: "Is this the day the Internet dies?" He was half joking, but only half. He's no fan of the Daily Stormer or sites like it. But he does realize the risks of a company like Cloudflare getting into content policing.

If DS has so much traffic that it needs service from someone like Cloudflare to not collapse under the load, well then maybe some of those people should start their own hosting service that can handle that much load. Otherwise, it seems the DS crowd isn't willing to put their money where their mouth is, so I have no sympathy.

Who gets to decide what a "nazi" is? You? What if I say you're a nazi? Your denials just make you more guilty. That's exactly what a nazi would say, nazi.