If society has decided that your political campaign is so toxic that no one wants to do business with you, should private entities be forced to deal with you if you are not a protected class?

Parler being booted is society's reaction to a movement that has been getting more extreme for the last 5 years.

I'll note the irony that many of the people complaining about companies refusing to deal with Parler are the same people that support bakeries being able to deny the business of people in a protected class.

> If society has decided that your political campaign is so toxic that no one wants to do business with you, should private entities be forced to deal with you if you are not a protected class?

I think this is the issue though, right. Elections represent what society wants. If 5 corporations get to decide you’re toxic and that prevents you from campaigning, what regulation will help insure this authority isn’t abused or misused?

I think it’s also worth noting the irony that many of the people complaining that bakers should be forced to bake a cake are supporting stripe being able to refuse service.

> I think it’s also worth noting the irony that many of the people complaining that bakers should be forced to bake a cake are supporting stripe being able to refuse service.

It's only ironic if you choose to ignore the fact that one of those cases involves discrimination against a protected class and the other does not. If you don't ignore that fact then the irony is only applicable from those who were espousing the "free market, free speech" position in the previous case.

Actually neither involves protected classes. At the time of the case, sexual orientation wasn’t protected. Fortunately, it was added as a protected class.

But even if it was a protected class at the time of the suite, I think the opinion was that religious rights (another protected class) come into play.

For me, this seems to expose that some people aren’t arguing from first principles but kind of change their position based on a pre-conceived notion.

So just like people now bringing up that looting isn’t so bad after the capital riot/insurrection were against rioting in situations over the summer.

It seems odd to me, or at least irrational, that someone could be against rioting for BLM purposes but for rioting for conspiracy theories. Or that someone could be against a baker’s ability to not serve a gay couple, but for a hosting company not serving an asshole megaphone company.

So just as people, rightly I think, were arguing that discrimination against sexual orientation should be a protected class and thus illegal; people now are arguing that net neutrality/free speech should have regulation, change in rights.

It’s not “ironic” in either sense.

Society hasn't decided anything unless you think a self selected group of people now represents the whole society. The Democratic party and its business lackeys decided to remove political in business opposition/competition with impunity and the Republican party being mostly indifferent about it.

>The Democratic party and its business lackeys

See this is part of the problem.

You are lumping together two different organizations that are nothing alike as somehow part of the same cabal.

Many different people from many different groups and organizations are reaching the same conclusion about Trump and the rise of violent right wing extremism.

Different parts of society are agreeing, and then in each of these parts there are individuals making decisions.

I'm not the one lumping them together, they lumped themselves together the same way unions and the Democratic party did a long time ago. Revolving doors, clientelism, business opportunities, power struggle,...

What? People who agree and have a common interests are not immediately part of a group who move as one.

> People who agree and have a common interests...

> Revolving doors, clientelism, business opportunities, power struggle,...

Add activism, donations, candidate support and cooperating with them on a local and global level.

Seems like a text book definition of a political party.

Or all that is normal and complex human interactions of people with similar interests.

And we call that a political party. What point are you trying to make?

> Republican party being mostly indifferent about it.

Well it's hard to argue against it when the people being cut out are trying to pipe-bomb your headquarters as well as the Democrats :/.

Who is society? The coastal rich liberal tech owners?

Many people make up these companies. It's not like there is a secret cabal of left-leaning tech owners that get together and make decisions like this.

In the case of Facebook and Google, their founders have voting majority shares and literally control the companies. It’s not a secret cabal of left-leaning owners, it is a publicly known set of left-leaning tech owners.

I’m not saying they act evilly, but Facebook is literally controlled by one person who cannot be outvoted by every other owner. And Google is controlled by two as well [0].

[0] https://fortune.com/2019/12/05/page-and-brin-google-control/

Ok, that doesn't mean there is a cabal of party operatives and big tech working together...

That's not what the parent poster suggested nor the one you initially replied to. What's being discussed is big tech acting as one given their homogenous political inclinations, and user Jochim thinking this is representative of "society" at large as a way to normalize and whitewash this chain of political censorship.

Right, but other people in "society" besides big tech, support this decision.

Nobody is thinking society is just big tech people. There are a lot of people who agree with tech's decision to cut off coup enablers.

I agree, that’s why I said “ It’s not a secret cabal of left-leaning owners, it is a publicly known set of left-leaning tech owners.”

Of course the key characteristic of secret cabals is that they are secret.

While I know of no evidence for secret cabals of big tech people, having individual capable of making unaccountable decisions is a different bad thing than secret cabals.

And I responding to someone saying these were big organizations with lots of decision makers. And that’s false for Facebook and google, since they have power concentrated.

It's not an explicit conspiracy but there are incredibly strong political bubbles in the US.

Yes, of course, that's how humans work. But these bubbles are often considered as a singular group moving as one, when in reality they are separate organizations and individuals who agree with each other.

Sure. But my point is that it's not correct to go from "multiple independent organizations think this way" to "basically everyone must think this way", as if those multiple organizations represent a random sample of the population.

Doesn't seem like any other groups are interested in supporting them either or else they wouldn't have any issue paying to self host/finding a willing provider.

So the same dynamics that has happened through history when one group is qualified as "untouchable" and any association with them, even if purely commercial, will bring retaliation.

We have to distinguish between those who are untouchable because of circumstances beyond their control (lineage, birthplace, disabilities) and those who are pariahs because of their behavior (criminals, militant anarchists, that mean old guy who sits on his porch with a shotgun).

I have sympathy for the former, but not the latter. While it would be kind to reach out to the latter group and help them mesh with society, there's no requirement anyone has to nor a guarantee the pariahs would want to mesh.

> We have to distinguish between...

No, we dont have to distinguish that. Your weak premise would justify the discrimination of atheists, anarchists, monarchists, pentecostals,marxists, epicureans... among thousands of other groups.

I dont really understand why it is so complicated.

At individual and private level I can decide who will I spend my time with, who I will invite to my place, go to the beach etc, with no coercion and I expect everybody else to have that right too.

At public level I have the expectation to serve all the people the same (ceteris paribus) unless I am forced by current legislation to not do so (like selling alcohol to a minor).

I would not extend that prohibition to a person who can request my services legally , if the person is going to pay and if he is going to behave like any other customer.

If I manage a 7/11 I would not create an ideological purity test to figure out if I will sell you gas or a soda and I think society will be way better if everybody does that too.

There are thousands of bakeries out there, but only a handful of payment processors.

If they manage to piss all of them off there's always bank transfer/postal cheque.

There is a clear difference between people clearly going to the same bakery over and over to harass and old guy, and being unable to actually do politics because of the technocrats and their cronies don’t be dishonest and don’t assume things for which you do not have proof. Not only that but if society decides that the Earth is flat would you agree with any decisions stemming from that, assuming there is a thing such as “society deciding” of course. I will note the irony about people saying that we should respect society “decisions” when they didn’t respect Trump becoming president since day one . Come on pal drop the dishonesty.

They're enforcing Civil right violations via lawsuit. It's no different then trying to rent from a racist landlord

Speaking of landlords who discriminate, Trump has never done anything to deserve a shred of respect. Long before day one. If anything they're saving gullible people from sending money to a conman

> There is a clear difference between people clearly going to the same bakery over and over to harass and old guy,There is a clear difference between people clearly going to the same bakery over and over to harass and old guy.

Look back a few decades and this is exactly the same argument that segregationists were using. You've basically just said: "That shopowner has a right not to deal with blacks, why do they keep harassing that poor man by trying to buy his goods?".

> I will note the irony about people saying that we should respect society “decisions” when they didn’t respect Trump becoming president since day one . Come on pal drop the dishonesty.

Those people didn't leave pipe-bombs at both party headquarters, call for their own Vice President to be hanged, or storm the Capitol building though. It's both transparent and dishonest to try to equate the two. Especially when you consider that Trump was one of the people peddling the birther nonsense about Obama and that pretty much everyone involved with the trump campaign was actually found guilty of some form of corruption. Trump himself has only escaped charges by virtue of being the President.

Except he was not denying them service just not engaging artistically lol stop being dishonest and trying to compare him to racists that denied service when he only denied artistic expression. From your comments it is quite obvious that you actually know a lot about the case. However you keep conveniently just leaving things out to fit your framing, please just drop the charade and the dishonesty.

The man offered a service where he would produce a cake for your wedding. The man refused to provide that service exclusively to LGBT couples. There's no charade or dishonesty to that at all and it's just as abhorrent as the people that made the same weak argument about potential black customers during segregation. You can try to pretend it's about "artistic expression" but in the end it's about wanting the ability to discriminate against a protected class that you don't like.

That is a non-sequitur right? Twitter , Google and Apple via their app stores, and now stripe are refusing to doing business not with a political party. They are refusing to doing business with people who have committed alleged(?) crimes.

The _actions_ by a group of people are resulting in these bans. Not the group's affiliation. Am I missing something here?

In the case of Stripe cutting off the Trump campaign, I guess you could make the argument that Trump (and therefore his campaign) are indeed alleged to have committed crimes. Then again, Trump is still the sitting president and therefore the effective head of his party (even tho, thankfully, at least some of his party are now abandoning him). I wonder what would happen if the Trump campaign switched to RNC-operated stripe accounts, with the RNC's blessing...

As for Google + Apple + Amazon (+ probably every other cloud provider and virtually every other hosting company) cutting off Parler or refusing their business in the first place: Parler was accused of not moderating "enough". This in itself is not yet criminal, given section 230 (which in this context ironically Trump wanted gone so bad he tried to hold the military budget hostage over it), and the definition of "enough moderation" was kept vague enough by Apple and Google and Amazon that Parler couldn't possibly ever comply if they wanted to.

The same argument about under-moderation can be made against facebook, e.g. when they aided - or even enabled - the Rohingya genocide, which saw thousands of people killed and hundreds of thousands of people displaced. Even the UN directly pointed fingers at facebook. Facebook admitted to their role[1], but came up with a bunch of lame excuses like that they do not really have any content moderators that understand the language.

People dug up quite a number of screenshots (anecdotal evidence) of abhorrent things written on Parler to justify them getting punished. But I found that not really convincing to single out Parler like that. If I went digging on Twitter or Facebook, or could see what people tell each other in Whatapp of Telegram groups, I would find the exact same things. I have reported things on twitter in the past, like people making extremely thinly-veiled death threats or inciting violence, and twitter's response has been sluggish and often in favor of the people talking about "nooses" and "you'll get what's coming to you" in the same sentence.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/06/technology/myanmar-facebo...

I dunno.

BLM may claim not to be responsible for the horrendous roiots and crime that has been committed in its name across America.

Trump may claim that he is not responsible for the tiny (in proportion) riots that happened in DC.

(IMO, they are both responsible, thus making BLM the one with more blood on its hands. But nobody asked me.)

BLM may claim that it is in their rights to fight law and order if it causes harm to individuals.

Trump may claim it is in his right to complain about law and order when (in his opinion) it was not lawful.

(IMO, this is a finer line. He certainly can legally complain. Riots are over the line for either right or left)

Stripe processes payments for BLM, and Twitter allows their posts, etc. So IMO the line they walk is fine and biased.

One of the many issues I have with the arguments equating the Black Lives Matter protests to the Trump protests last week is that people tend to want to compare this one single Trump event to all protests nationwide over a period of months. If we’re doing an apples-to-apples comparison, here’s the Black Lives Matter DC protest: https://www.forbes.com/sites/rachelsandler/2020/06/06/large-...

...or, conversely, we should compare damage and lives lost during Black Lives Matter protests to all damage and lives lost by Trump-supporting white supremacists.

My point was more that “just because losing access to Facebook/Twitter means nothing to you, doesn’t mean it means nothing to someone else”.

But to more directly address your point, I ask you - what crime has Trump been convicted of?

The private entities are not the justice department. They are not the judiciary. They are not lawyers and they are not juries. They do not require criminal conviction before taking action. Your question is irellevant.

But to give you a partial answer anyway: Many criminals are never convicted. Many _known_ criminals are never convicted, due to lack of undeniable proof. Some criminals are convicted on lesser crimes, just to get them off the streets. There's plenty of evidence to support the position that Trump is a criminal. He may never be convicted but not because he's innocent.

The question is not “what legal power does Twitter have”. I’m not saying they legally can’t kick him off their platform.

The discussion is whether they should be able to kick someone off their platform who has been convicted of no crime, because of how integral they have become to the political process.

Yes, because you don't have to be convicted of a crime to have done something wrong and regardless it doesn't matter. Twitter can kick someone off for whatever reason they want. That's something currently protected in our law.

On the other hand, there is a legal concept called Common Carriage - private companies that have monopoly are not allowed to refuse service to anyone unless mandated by courts.

If it was a power company shutting off electricity to Facebok, Twitter and AWS, because they disagree with their business practices, we would have an outrage right now about how undemocratic it is.

(And I say this with all my distaste for Trumpism)

Kind of unrelated to the point of your post -- what does it mean when any discussion about current events/politics requires every poster to affirm they do not support a particular political candidate. I don't have an answer myself, I'm just wondering if it's considered somethinf like self-censorship or if there's something else to it. Either way, it kinda feels weird to me.

If someone believes in the principle of "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it" they will naturally find themselves defending some pretty odious speech - and gaining the support of people who believe pretty odious things.

After all, a free speech advocate and a neo-nazi would both support the publication of Mein Kampf - but the former might well want to be clear they're not the latter. (and of course, to complicate the situation further, the latter may want to disguise themselves as the former)

As to why you see so many posters affirming they don't support Trump - that's because HN readers aren't Trump's target demographics: Trump only got 12% of the vote in San Francisco in 2020. IMHO it's believable that on HN, free speech advocates simply outnumber Trump supporters.

Twitter is not a monopoly. There are plenty of media companies, social or not, that he could use to carry his message. He has a freaking press office.

Maybe these are monopolies, and if they are we shouldn't be granting them special status to entrench them further. We should be looking to open them up and break them apart.

Perhaps they’ll become less integral to the process.

Integral for whom, though? Not a huge number of people are involved in political twitter:

https://techcrunch.com/2019/10/23/just-6-of-u-s-adults-on-tw...

I didn't mean to imply that anything that isn't a utility is unimportant, but only that (unlike the parent) I think there is a clear difference between social media and actual utilities.

As for your question, probably not. And there is an interesting debate as to whether political candidates should be some sort of protected class. Though I don't think the issue is particularly urgent given that political candidates across the political spectrum (including Donald Trump) still have access to all of those things.

For the most part, payment process, web hosts, and mail providers are interchangeable, so I don't think it is a big deal that Trump can't use Stripe specifically.

Social Media is more complicated. I guess we will see how things develop, but my intuition is that Trump will open a parler account, interested parties will follow him there, uninterested parties won't, and his most noteworthy statements will be widely reported in the media. So, the same situation as when Trump was on Twitter.