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.
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.