I didn't realize that Stripe's actions were due to a government order. Probably because they weren't.
You're conflating a private organization's decisions with government action. If the government were to attempt do as you suggest, the courts would slap them down hard.
Imagine all the airlines were run by Republicans, and they universally prevented anyone who works for Democratic leaning organizations (Eg ActBlue) from flying because some small number of bad actors on their side did some bad things.
We would do well to imagine what it would be like to be prevented access with no legal recourse to an an oligopoly of services that cannot practically be bypassed, and ask ourselves what potential for abuse exists when such impactful decisions can be taken without standard legal due process.
What evidence can you provide to support your claim that various corporations are colluding to block folks?
What evidence can you provide that said corporations have a "preferred political party?"
You have no such evidence. What's more, whether or not the nebulous set of entities to which you refer (let's have specific names and specific actions).
I'd further say that "cloud" (read: someone else's servers) services, a few large social networking sites and a small subset of payment processors (I'm guessing that this is the set of corporations to which you were referring since you don't bother to be specific) do not constitute an "oligopoly."
I'd further add that there are hundreds of hosting and co-location providers, dozens of payment processors and a variety of mechanisms to share data, information and messaging.
I find your diatribe to be sorely lacking in evidence, reasoned argument and factual information.
Finally, your analogy concerning airlines is deeply flawed, as that isn't even close to what's going on.
Please provide some evidence for your claims.
Otherwise, I can only conclude that you are arguing in bad faith.
> Operation Choke Point was a 2013 initiative of the United States Department of Justice[1] which investigated banks in the United States and the business they did with firearm dealers, payday lenders, and other companies believed to be at a high risk for fraud and money laundering.
> This operation, disclosed in an August 2013 Wall Street Journal story,[2] was officially ended in August 2017,[3] and the FDIC settled multiple lawsuits by promising to Congress additional training for its examiners and to cease issuing "informal" and "unwritten suggestions" to banks.
>If the government were to attempt do as you suggest, the courts would slap them down hard.
The issues around Operation Choke Point[0] that you linked to were investigated by Congress and the Department of Justice and, as I said, smacked down hard.
The above isn't analogous to the current situation, but the result was exactly as I said it would be.
Thanks for making my point for me.
( https://reason.com/2019/08/26/secret-memos-show-the-governme... )
How is that relevant to Stripe? They aren't the government. They're not even one of the top ten biggest payment processors.
I can only conclude that you're not arguing in good faith. More's the pity.
If the baker had altogether refused to bake a cake for the gay couple, it would have been discrimination on a protected class.
https://www.cnn.com/2018/06/04/politics/masterpiece-colorado...
No, he was ruled in favor of because the US Supreme Court found anti-religious animus in the enforcement process leading to the State ruling against him.
> Part of this was that he was okay with baking a cake for the gay couple but NOT one that had certain messaging that would violate his faith.
No, it wasn't. The decision specifically notes that he objected to being required to make cakes for same sex weddings entirely, on both free speech and free exercise of religion grounds [0], not that he was willing to do so dependent on messaging, so any such willingness he might have had was not a basis of the decision.
Instead, the Court found animus toward Phillips’ religious views by the state commission that found against him, both expressed in the process and evidenced through difference in how Phillips was treated vs. other bakers in similar cases before the same Commission, which mean that whether or not the law could otherwise have been enforced against him, the specific government act had an impermissible purpose, requiring it to be struck down. [1]
Note: All quotes from Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd. v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, 584 U.S. ___ (2018)
[0] “Phillips raised two constitutional claims before the ALJ. He first asserted that applying CADA in a way that would require him to create a cake for a same-sex wedding would violate his First Amendment right to free speech by compelling him to exercise his artistic talents to express a message with which he disagreed. [...] Phillips also contended that requiring him to create cakes for same-sex weddings would violate his right to the free exercise of religion, also protected by the First Amendment.”
[1] “The official expressions of hostility to religion in some of the commissioners’ comments—comments that were not disavowed at the Commission or by the State at any point in the proceedings that led to affirmance of the order—were inconsistent with what the Free Exercise Clause requires. The Commission’s disparate consideration of Phillips’ case compared to the cases of the other bakers suggests the same. For these reasons, the order must be set aside.”
https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/masterpiece-cakeshop...
That's how you enforce civil rights laws
It's no different then trying to rent an apartment from a racist to make a case
Who are they and why do you think they send people?
His custom cakes are small works of art. If he'd be forced to create one against his beliefs, why not force a far left painter to paint a favorable portrait of Trump?
And indeed this situation has little to do with Silicon Valley corporations offering generic services to millions of people. They are like supermarkets, who should not be allowed to refuse service to anyone.
I would expect a Christian cake maker would not agree to accept my money to design a cake that worships satan for example. Likewise I wouldn’t expect a satanic cake maker to make a cake celebrating Jesus.
Would it be right to force an Islamic cake maker to make a cake featuring Muhammad’s likeness?
If he refused to provide groom&groom wedding toppers I'd fully support him but this is food not speech
Likewise I wouldn't expect him to write messages or make decorations he disagreed with
But in this case it's a simple case of discrimination
The fact that something is mentioned in a news article about a court case doesn't mean that (even if it is true) it is part of the basis for the decision. If you want to understand the basis for a court decision, it's best to read the decision itself.
This seems like a giant loophole to negate anti-discrimination laws.
Are subway "sandwich artists" able to discriminate in their art?
The baker discriminated against the couple but the supreme court punted on ruling on the laws and just said the goverment hadn't acted correctly in that case so threw it out. The law is still on record and baker has to abide by it and stop discriminating against gay couples unless the court someday rules otherwise
It's also important to note that companies aren't cutting ties with Trump because of his political ideology, they're cutting ties with him because there's a strong argument he broke the law, and they don't want to be in the awkward position of facilitating that, especially as it could open them to their own legal liability.
However not only did all the big tech companies not withdraw support for Biden or prevent his campaign from using their apps, they doubled down and censored the story so most voters would not hear of it before the elections.
Again, big double standards at play here from a moral sense.
The larger issue here is that the internet really isn't so decentralized as it used to be.
There's like 10-20 major companies that control the majority of services people use, or the underlying infrastructure that powers the whole internet. This goes against the original design of the internet which meant it to be fully decentralized so no single entity or small set of entities could prevent the flow of information.
We should try to go back in that direction, either through competition and free markets or by enforcing it via existing or new regulations to prevent situations like this from ever happening again.
Given that there's uncertainty around it, can we really conclude that "they broke the law" and that it's unfair that big tech did not withdraw their support?
One little warning from someone living in a real fascist state (Russia). It wasn't always a fascist state, but when it began to morph into one, censorship what what they started with. Of course, it was legal, because it was all private companies, rightfully executing their liberty to not show anyone they don't like...
The rich irony, of course, is that regular fascist masses that support government are brainwashed to think, they it is the marginalized opposition who are fascists.
And considering the ToS citations were I service of a potentially criminal act, fascism doesn't enter the picture: This is as much about these companies' own legal liability if they allow their platform to facilitate potential criminal activity even though it's against their own rules.
That's called regulation. We have a lot of it. Free speech isn't absolute and free markets aren't either.
I think your making my point. Your freedom of speech doesn't entitle you to use it on the stage built by someone else.
Free markets aren't either
Again, that doesn't contradict me. It would take a fundamental adjustment to the legal framework surrounding either user licensing agreements or the definition of public utilities in order to say these companies aren't allowed to enforce their current ToS.
If you want to argue that laws should change, that's fine, but then we're talking about a slider between the definition & right to own private property on the one hand, and freedom of speech using 3rd party's property on the other hand. If you want to slide it more towards the later, you are taking away from the former, and vice versa. I don't know any formula for where that line should be drawn, only that in this particular example I believe the line drawn was acceptable.
Public utilities and antitrust are not new concepts, nor is this really a private property issue. It's about power and control over our private lives (which should come first before corporations). The internet has changed everything in less than 2 decades and laws from a century ago are no longer sufficient.
When governments start asking for social media accounts at border crossings, and Twitter claims to be a public square, and even it's CEO says that social media is a human right; we need to address the new digital equivalence of our existing protections.
Here, I fixed it for you:
Violate them, and if you are not someone whose political views we support, you can take your business elsewhere.
And they aren’t even banning people for solely the latter! Representatives who continue to support the president have had no issues.
For the record I hate Trump and am a European Social Democrat.
Facebook is a US company with a lot more eyes on US activity than in Burma. They're going to see, understand, and react to events in the US much more easily than anywhere else in the world.
That isn't me condoning Facebook's activity here: they need to do a better job elsewhere in the world. What I'm saying is that their failure may be just that: a failure, not selective enforcement.
The issue here is that the platforms were used in service of activity that was arguably illegal. These platforms' failure to enforce their rules consistently doesn't mean they shouldn't have enforced them in this case, it means they should have been doing a better job all along. If you want to pass laws regarding platforms like this and free speech, it should be regulations that encourage more consistency, not less moderation of content.
They already do this in many places.
The most common example would be common carrier laws. Those aren't particularly controversial.
Do you believe that common carrier laws are some huge infringement on company rights or something?
Do you believe that common carrier laws are "fascist"?
If not, then you must admit that your previous argument is pretty silly.
In particular though, common carrier laws tend to apply to services that have been given a special privilege to have for their own use some type of public resource or special privilege. Like broadcasting frequencies or the right-of-way granted to power companies and other utilities. That isn't the case for these platforms.
You're absolutely correct that in the US no one may be punished by the state without due process. But Stripe isn't a government and refusing to do business with someone doesn't require a criminal trial.
Or are you claiming that Stripe cannot choose its customers unless a court has convicted that customer of a crime?
Also, how far do we go with this reasoning? Stripe and PayPal refuse service so they're supposed to "Go build their own" (it costs billions to create a new service like stripe or PayPal that can compare). AWS shut you down? Build your own data center... (Again, costs millions or billions). What if next Intel or AMD decides to not sell you processors? Go build your own fab and develop your own hardware? What if the silicon miners won't sell you silicon, are you now supposed to go build your own mine?
The issue isn't that companies have a right to do it, it's that there are no viables alternatives to these large duopolies, and that "creating your own" is not an alternative.
What happens if the party in power next decides to attack religious organizations who congregate during that pandemic with the same type of concerted de-platforming? What if it's people who advocate against raising taxes who are next as deemed "morally corrupt"?
It's not hard to imagine this type of anti competitive, semi-concerted effort to de platform a new company being targeted at other things in the future. We need laws to catch up to our modern society and either break up the monopolies or put a lot more protections around the types of discrimination that are illegal, which should include political affiliation (this is law in California for employment discrimination so it's not that far fetched of an idea).