No it’s not spam. Stripe stopped payments to Gab, which is mentioned in the article in the greater context of Silicon Valley companies having too much power in our society, controlling our speech/thoughts/politics/values. We should not put trust in Stripe and give them the same undue power given to Visa and MasterCard over payments in our society, unless they refuse to abuse that power.

Cry me a river, Stripe isn’t the government. Gab is clearly a platform for hatred, and it was totally in their purview to drop them as a customer - and oh look: Gab’s still here anyway. Baloney.

>Gab is clearly a platform for hatred

It's an "also-ran" social network, nothing more. It has minimal influence.

The fact that it's the place people end up when they're kicked off other platforms doesn't make it a "platform for hate", any more than Facebook.

Does Gab not police neo-nazi content?

Gab is not a platform for hatred. It is just a general social network. Much of what is said about it is exaggerated. But leaving that aside, a payment utility should not get into the business of dictating what customers can and can't say beyond the minimal legal requirements in that jurisdiction. This is how we get a monoculture where wrongspeak is not permitted.

As for your "Gab's still here" comment. Clearly the lack of willing payment providers, hosts, registrars, etc. is a hindrance that costs them time and money, and prevents them from being as successful as they could be. The "still here" measure is not a valid measure of anything.

Stripe pulled out of Gab because they violated their policies on adult content. This has nothing to do with conservatives or hate speech.

And even if it was to do with the hate speech, have you considered the rights of the companies providing these services? I am sure there are many Jewish people inside of Microsoft, and plenty on Azure. You would force those people to provide services to someone who actively calls for their humiliation or even death?

The US has already had this discussion decades ago. Hate is not a protected class of citizen, you absolutely can push out people who deserve to be outcasts.

>I am sure there are many Jewish people inside of Microsoft, and plenty on Azure. You would force those people to provide services to someone who actively calls for their humiliation or even death?

Do no Jewish people work at Twitter? Ayatollah Khamenei still has an account. And I'd argue he has more power, influence, and potential to do damage to Jewish people than Richard Spencer.

> have you considered the rights of the companies providing these services

These big payment platforms (Paypal, Stripe, Visa, Mastercard, etc.) are not really private organizations. They are public utilities providing a fundamental service required to operate our society, especially when they are as ubiquitous as the big players like Stripe. They should either only police speech to the extent the law requires, or be regulated heavily so they don't enact their own speech stifling policies. The alternative is that we outsource all our fundamental rights bit by bit to private companies who then support just speech they align with.

> Hate is not a protected class of citizen, you absolutely can push out people who deserve to be outcasts.

I'm not commenting on the legality. I am commenting on the fact that it violates the fundamental principles of free speech, which are more basic than our laws.

Wouldn't it be easy to destroy a competitor or startup with racist bots? Anti-competitive behavior seems to be the modus operandi of west coast capital.