> And at some point, that means it becomes virtually impossible to express yourself if your views are unpopular enough.

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.

News organizations used to be much more interested in presenting the “other” side. Sometimes referring to outsider writings when they felt their own biases prevented them from doing justice to the ideas they disagreed with.

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.

Murrow devoted an episode to McCarthy because at the time Murrow was one of three people who had an episode to devote to McCarthy.

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.

Referencing McCarthy’s “friendly” networks and TV shows misses the point. “Disgusting” viewpoints can today be had on Drudge Report and numerous other places friendly to that viewpoint.

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.

It may well have been that I've missed your point. Can you make your point a little clearer.

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.

This is in direct reference to the line:

> 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.

What is the basis for the claim that it was easier in the past than now to get help sharing your content? What is the basis for the "norm of fairness" being claimed? What time period is being held up as the "past" here?

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.

Except that they aren’t necessarily highly unpopular. They are just outside of the political norms that happen to be popular within a small class in control of the platforms.

If they aren't highly unpopular then there should be a demand and market for services/platforms that do allow those opinions.

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

I was under the impression that the main thing preventing "another company/service should be able to fill the void." - is the rules and hoops / unchecked power of the visa/mc/amex etc.

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.

> 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.

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.

exactly. My senator told me that this thing was not really used, was being discontinued, and there was no evidence that any banks or processors we discriminating based upon it.

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 do indeed need better ways for people to use decentralized payment options like bitcoin cash, or , zcash, monero and similar. However from what I had seen some time ago, the hard part is getting money into the coin. Using CC or banks for this makes it harder in the US than I think it should be.

Basically, we don't just need a post-office bank, we need a post-office networked payment processor, hosting service, and DNS registry, ensuring that there's always an option of last resort for enabling Bad Things to be done over the internet exactly as freely as we legally allow them to be done in meatspace.

What smaller company is out there competing with Cloudflare, or Partenon? There isn't, because there's a minimum size to enter those markets, and not enough scale to sustain niches.

There clearly is such demand. However, all such services require partnership with other services, that's the nature of a modern economy - there's always a supply chain. And the sort of liberals who are systematically trying to shut down all conservatives from the internet will also systematically attack those supply chains, from web hosting to DNS to bandwidth. They will never stop, they will never cease because their goal is totalitarian control over thought and ideas. They are not the majority, but they are significantly more vicious and the majority is largely passive.

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.

That's how speech works since the concentration of press at the middle of the XX century, and I don't think there's anybody claiming it was a good thing. It has never before been that way.

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.

> No one wants to be a service or common carrier

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.

I'm ok with the line being "dont host the Daily Stormer"

But that isn't the line, the line is don't be Sargon of Akkad.

OK with that line too. Guy's a douche.

And tomorrow the line will be don't be Republican.

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

Can you link to what you are talking about? Because if it's what I think it is, this is my neighborhood. It was a parade cancelled to avoid violence, mostly by people who don't live in this neighborhood and don't care about the parade but about politics.

And what about when the line is you? Will that also be OK?

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

That citation is about putting people in concentration camps, not about free speech.

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.

"Don't be"? He's been declared outlaw and hunted across the land? No? He's been rounded up and put in a camp? No? He's been arrested? No?

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