Your sense of how the Civil Rights movement went is... interesting. It isn’t accurate though, and seems oddly idealized. Here’s the reality.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_civil_rights...

For some context, the movement really kicked off in 1954, the famous bus boycott wouldn’t occur for another two years, after Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat in late 1955, shortly after Emmett Till was murdered. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr wouldn’t give his famous speech in Washington for eight more years, in 1963, the same year Dr. King was arrested again earlier that year. The same year that George Wallace, “Calls for "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever" in his inaugural address.”

So no, it didn’t go quite how you think it did. “Some censorship” and “some police and other authorities,” while technically correct understates the reality. Whole regions and their entire governments fought tooth and nail, ultimately requiring the deployment of the national guard. Media helped to an extent, and the federal government acted in slow motion as it always does.

It did take decades. Several decades, now that I think of it.

But do you think that federal intervention would have occurred in the absence of national mass media coverage?

Edit: Yes, there were huge protests, both locally and in Washington, DC. But if the national mass media had not covered those protests, would there have been any action?

I think not.

More than a decade of social upheavel was never going to be swept under the rug, unless the government flexed its muscles and ignored constitutional protections. This is the point, Patreon is just another outlet, and as long as the government isn’t using its extraordinary powers to arrest, supppress, and kill there are always other outlets. We have no guarantee of an easy time, and certainly no guarantee of imposing upon a private company. We have a right to speak, and I think that implies a right to be heard, but not a right to any particular audience just because it’s the one we want.

Last, remember that one of the most potent things to come out of attempts to silence Dr. King was his Letters From Birmingham Jail. On the other side of the same coin, Hitler wrote Mein Kampf in jail. Sargon lost a platform to make money, and wants to act like he’s been crippled in the marketplace of ideas.

Bull. Shit. Free Speech doesn’t mean that you get to dictate how another nominally free entity behaves. The people who’ve invested time and money into Patreon get to choose who they do business with, they don’t have a legal or moral obligation to act as middleman fundraiser for anyone they see as threatening their business.

But the but-for world here -- analogous to Twitter, Patreon, etc censoring stuff -- is that national mass media would not have covered that stuff.

And how does what you say about Patreon not apply to traditional media that's privately owned?

Also, I'm not necessarily arguing that Patreon etc should be prevented from censoring. Mainly I'm pointing to consequences of traditional media being rep0laced by social media, Patreon, etc.

Some decades ago, there were similar concerns about public streets and squares being replaced by shopping malls. And this is a far more extreme version.

Like just recently, the whole point was that the White House had to ask the national media to give the President airtime - they are, in fact, completely able to refuse to.