On the one hand, Patreon shouldn't have to do business with people they don't like. On the other hand, at what point do we accept that we have different viewpoints and live and let live?
The biggest one for me in recent history was Cloudflare arbitrarily deciding to stop hosting the Daily Stormer. Sure, DS is vile, but at the point we start enforcing censorship on a whim instead of hardened policies that aren't selectively enforced, I think it becomes worrisome.
I guess I don't have a problem with people deciding what messages they do and do not want to support, as much as I have a larger problem with the rest of the world handing them the reigns.
Centralization is the real evil, here. Why are we giving companies and people the right to silence vast amounts of voices and opinions on random whims?
Then you see counter-arguments, like "well if you don't want to get banned, don't say bad things!" But then, who decides what's bad? The societal norms are shifting to a place where there are certain topics that are not allowed to be discussed at all even if looking at them from a critical lens. So, there are problems that people have, and things that need to be talked about, but they aren't allowed to say anything about it. They can only reference the idea from some distant euphemism.
The ones that do use their voices are banished to the shadows where, not only do they not stop thinking and saying what they were before, but now they dig their heels in further. They spread out to forums that will have them, and incidentally tend to allow hate speech or inciting violence. So we're taking the ideas we do not find palatable and sending them off to a distant land where the other bad ideas go to twist and tear and fester and rot.
To me, personally and anecdotally, this seems to be happening with increasing velocity. We're tightening our grip on what speech is acceptable and using centralized services to force this control on ourselves, over a platform that has always been about the open exchange of ideas.
So what do we do? I don't know. Privately-owned services should be free to censor. People should also continue to speak freely (if legal). I certainly think Net Neutrality is essential at this point, whether enforced via public infrastructure or some kind of over-arching regulation. But, there's not much anyone can do in the current framework of things other than encourage decentralization. And I do, when I can.
Also, for the record, I'm a feminist, left-leaning socialist. So good luck writing me off as another conservative windbag who doesn't understand the first amendment that's crowing about censorship. I think censorship is a problem, whether it's via private platforms or not.
> On the other hand, at what point do we accept that we have different viewpoints and live and let live?
The government, soapboxes, homes and places of business that are happy to have them.
Freedom of Speech is not the right to be heard. If people don't like what you have to say, or how you are saying it, they are free to walk away. If you don't like what someone is doing in your place of business, you can also throw them out. That includes being allowed to throw a loud ranting racist out of a, say, pub or a website.
These individuals are free to create their own businesses and websites which facilitate whatever kind of discourse they please, nobody can take that away from them (unless they venture into fighting words). They, however, seem to want to be where their ideas are not wanted[1].
Patreon would likely be happy to have a conservative on their website if the primary concern of the content was not intolerance.
> I'm torn about this.
Karl Popper helps clear it up[2]. His wording surrounding FoS is particularly illuminating because it doesn't specifically calling out left-extremists or right-extremists; both have been pretty awful about attacking speech, especially the escalation over the past few years.
People keep saying this and repeating it, but as far as I can tell this meme is destructive and wrong. Freedom of speech isn't just a legal assurance that congress shall make no law abridging it. It is also a set of cultural norms rooted deeply in a long lineage of hard won ideas. It is Evelyn Hall's principle "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it". It is Friedrich Nietzsche's dictum that only insecure societies are threatened by quirky characters with weird ideas. It is our own Daniel Gackle's observation that tolerance is the experience of suffering through unpleasant ideas. We endure that suffering because the world is dramatically better on balance when we do.
Popper and the paradox of tolerance have nothing to do with it because we aren't talking about fascists angling to march on Washington DC to burn down the Library of Congress. We're talking about people who may have made a careless remark, or have quirky ideas, or disagree with the overall bent of the arc of history.
By banning these people platforms like Twitter and Patreon are eroding free speech not in the legal sense, but in the cultural norms sense. If these norms continue getting eroded, god help us all -- it may set humanity and the western civilization back by hundreds of years.
> Freedom of Speech is not the right to be heard. If people don't like what you have to say, or how you are saying it, they are free to walk away.
That's technically correct, but it doesn't get at the core of the concept. If you read the original arguments in favor of freedom of speech, you'll see they don't focus on the rights of the speaker as much as the rights of the listener. John Milton, Thomas Paine, and John Stuart Mill all made the point (in various ways) that every time you stop someone from saying or publishing an idea, you are also preventing others who want to hear or read that idea from doing so. In addition, censorship requires delegating a censor. Effectively, that means you are letting someone else decide what you're allowed to read and hear. I don't know about everyone else, but there is no government body or private company that I trust with that power. Disclaimers, warnings, and age verification steps are fine, but memory-holing ideas? No thank you.
In the case of Patreon, there is a man who people want to give money to. He wants to accept that money. There is no criminal activity on either side of the transaction. Yet Patreon is preventing these people from doing what they want because Patreon dislikes one paragraph of the man's boorish utterances. This is in direct contradiction to their stated policy (where the person has to endanger the safety of others) and there's a suspicious amount of partisan bias in the application of these policies.
Patreon isn't the first company to behave this way, just the most recent. These actions increase political polarization, erode public trust in institutions and companies, and confirm the persecution complexes of many on the ends of the political spectrum. I'm sure the people in charge of these platforms feel like they're doing the right thing, but I think they are mistaken.
Sure, I guess you could say Patreon has the right to ban people from its service. But people have found its not easy or practical to compete with them. They've found everyone from their domain registrar to their website host to their payment processor refusing to do business with them.
And at some point, that means it becomes virtually impossible to express yourself if your views are unpopular enough. No one wants to be a service or common carrier, everyone buckles under controversy when it occurs. Should some views only be expressable by millionaires or people with enough resources not to need services from anyone? It's not legal censorship, but it's de facto censorship none the less.
As the likes of SubscribeStar found out, offering a 'free speech' alternative to Patreon is now virtually impossible because of it.
The problem is, "intolerance" is an arbitrary distinction, especially over time and especially now. In sites like Patreon, Youtube, or Reddit which apparently presume to operate as a free marketplace to identify, discuss, and promote ideas, censoring those which merely hate (rather than actively condone actual/specific acts of violence) sets the precedent toward greater and more arbitrary censorship (whether people that condone it acknowledge it or not). As the goalposts shift, more 'reasonable' and, let's go with your word, 'conservative' ideas begin to be denounced and censored.
Your argument 'not the right to be heard' does not apply in the context of shutting down users with controversial ideas on sites like Patreon and Reddit because visitors have ample space to not seek out the quiet 'ranting racist'. I have yet to experience people being thrown out of a bar, restaurant, or business because their conversation included racist or controversial topics.
>If you don't like what someone is doing in your place of business, you can also throw them out.
Although we all agree that this is legal to do (and nobody is thinking about taking Patreon to court), there is a second, more subtle social issue at play. Taking it to the extreme, if you live in a company town earning company scrip to spend at the company store, when the company decides that they don't like what you're doing in their place of business (organizing a union, perhaps), getting kicked out is functionally identical to a governmental sanction. As a result, even though the law permits companies to engage in heavy-handed social hedge-trimming, in some cases it can have the same problems as the government censorship that we have already agreed is bad. It would be going too far to say that corporations have an inalienable moral right to police whatever they control.
Theres a fine line between “being allowed to throw a loud ranting racist out of a pub” because the pub is your business and you should be allowed to choose who to do business with and you don’t like racists... and throwing out a person of a different race because it’s your business and you should be allowed to choose who to do business with and don’t like that race...
That is, we want businesses to have the right to choose who to do business with, unless we disagree with their reasons for not wanting to do business with someone.
I don't think anyone is saying that there should be a law that forces Patreon to allow everyone on their platform. More a lamenting that the consequences of large platforms acting like this might be bigger than people think.
Reminds me a little of the whole Parental Advisory thing with rock music or Spotify's decisions around violent artists. How outraged should we be that artists that say very questionable things are on Spotify and Youtube? Should songs about murder, rape or glorifying breaking the law be allowed on those platforms? Or where should the companies draw the line?
> These individuals are free to create their own businesses and websites which facilitate whatever kind of discourse they please, nobody can take that away from them
That's very clearly not true at all. Just a dozen or so major companies or orgs can work together to shut you out of having nearly any reach at all. For practical purposes, you'll have zero reach. Any combined small group of them can easily be enough to make your life online dramatically more difficult.
They can get you at the domain registration (oligopoly + mixture of cartel behavior). Oh, well, you have no right to a domain registration.
They can get you at the ISP level (oligopoly). Oh, well, you have no right to Internet access.
They can get you at the discovery level. Oh, well, Google (monopoly), Facebook (monopoly), Twitter, Reddit, et al. don't owe you any discovery access.
They can get you at the hosting level. Oh, well, nobody owes you access to any sort of hosting, from Azure or AWS to Wordpress or Tumblr.
They can get you at the network transit level. If just a few ISPs or large backbone operators in the US blacklist your site from their customers, few will be able to see you. Again for practical purposes, you're dead in that market.
Google as one example has openly bragged about their potential to conspire with other malevolent entities to tightly control expression/speech. They know their position and exactly how they can abuse it to their political or ideological bias.
In the age of inherently subjective 'hate speech' as The Devil that must be stopped at any and all costs, none of this is far fetched in the least. It's going to get a lot worse yet; the topics covered by 'hate speech' blockades will get far more extensive in the coming years. The enemies of free speech have been wildly emboldened by their successes and the lack of push-back. The entire West is going to end up with the equivalent of a less restrictive Chinese firewall, and that's where liberal Democracy is guaranteed to die.
> The government, soapboxes, homes and places of business that are happy to have them.
This made a lot of sense when I was a kid. Since that time, communication has become incredibly centralized - whether it’s the platform (eg, YT), or the infrastructure to keep it running (eg, Cloudflare.)
Today, if one or two private enterprises decide they want to eliminate your voice, you’re effectively barred from the public square. You can’t roll your own cloud flare.
When private resources so entirely consume our public interactions, the old stand-by of “well, private companies can do what they want...” seems to engage in a form of category error. It may be a private organization, but it’s dominating a public good.
The problem comes when network effects, entry barriers, and oligopolies make private exclusion take the character of a ban from the public square. Starting a rival credit card company, payment processor, and social network is not a viable option for people looking to participate in public discourse.
Plenty of times throughout history, oligopolists and monopolists have been forced to follow common-carriage rules, whether by actual regulation or the threat thereof.
Also, you are conflating the First Amendment, a legal instrument, with the ideas of freedom of speech and open discourse. The First Amendment bars the government from itself censoring people. It does not say that the government cannot require non-discrimination on the part of private companies.
I partially agree. Freedom of speech isn't the right to be heard by those who don't want to hear you, but it most certainly is the right to be heard by those who do want to hear you.
To put it another way: Alice wants to say something. Bob wants to hear what Alice has to say. Cedric, a would-be censor, wants to prevent Alice getting her message out to Bob. Censorship is whenever Cedric wins, and freedom of speech is whenever Cedric fails.
The problem with the Paradox of Tolerance is that while in theory it is quite correct and rather profound, in practice it's often an explanation trotted out by those in power to silence those they do not like.
Loved the link to the paradox on wikipedia. I have said my whole adult life that I believe in tolerance for everything but intolerance - never knew and happy to find it's been called out as a bit of a paradox since 1945!
>These individuals are free to create their own businesses and websites which facilitate whatever kind of discourse they please, nobody can take that away from them.
This is not just about free speech and freedom of association. It's about anti-competitive practices in the marketplaces. People who have done what you suggest discover a coordinated effort to de-platform which includes things like making it impossible to use theoretically neutral infrastructure, like CAs or DNS or routing or payment systems or monetization. Meanwhile "approved" competitors see no such bar. In the United States this is conspiracy to restrain trade. When a person can only make a living if the platforms approve of the content, the platform is picking winners and losers in the market. These are outrageously unfair business practices.
I think the recent congressional hearings regarding Facebook frames this argument more properly. At the heart, it's whether these platforms are to be considered content providers or publishers. I believe each has unique responsibilities to the 1st amendment
These platforms are becoming the de facto public square, and there is not necessarily room for a bunch of competing platforms to function collectively as a public square; one will tend to dominate for each form of content, it appears.
These platforms are supposed to do two things:
- blog/media hosting, both storage and web distribution
- Handling regulatory and coding requirements for accepting payments, via a trustworthy single payee... so that subscribers aren't having to provide credit card numbers to every random content creator out there
These platforms are violating expectations by going beyond solving those problems and trying to be a nanny. We don't need nannies on the internet.
They aren't even doing a good job of being a neutral nanny. On patreon, there is a ton of objectionable content depending on your point of view and morality. (On youtube, there is a ton of garbage content, though not much adult/erotic material because it's mostly banned.) If either platform cared about the perception of their platforms being a place for content appropriate for a formal dinner party, they wouldn't operate as they do now.
In the case of Patreon, if someone doesn't like a patreon creator's content, they don't have to subscribe to it.
Patreon content is discoverable, but it's not self-promoted by Patreon, so people aren't generally going to see much that they find objectionable. For platforms like youtube, which use subscriptions/histories to recommend other videos unsolicited, there needs to be a better tagging system so visitors can blacklist tags that will trigger them. Other than that, these platforms are not, and should not pretend to be, in the nanny business. And everyone needs to have a thick enough skin that they can encounter a summary, title, or first few seconds of a video they find offensive and simply laugh it off as internet idiots being idiots, and navigate elsewhere rather than pretending they have moral justification to complain to platforms about content that is neither violence-promoting nor defamatory.
How do you then defend Patreon hosting radical leftists calling for political violence on their platform, and not taking it down after its reported? But banning a viewpoint opponent of social justice for what seems to be clearly political reasons?
> The government, soapboxes, homes and places of business that are happy to have them.
But if say ISPs start blocking non-beige content, then freedom of speech is dead. Shouldn't there be a minimum internet infrastructure where people can say whatever they want? Aren't CDNs part of that infrastructure?
Everything about your response I agree with except the tongue-in-cheek “these individuals are free to create their own businesses and websites which facilitate whatever kind of discourse they please, nobody can take that away from them...”
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.
> If people don't like what you have to say, or how you are saying it, they are free to walk away.
Yes, but it's funny that we're now deliberating conflating 'people' with 'private corporations', a conflation that folks on the left vociferously condemned when it came to Citizens United.
I think we should look at ourselves a bit more carefully in the mirror - are private corporations supposed to be held to a higher standard or not? Especially when they have de facto monopolistic control over platforms that everyone uses.
For example, it's all very well to say that Google is a private corporation free to censor you if it wishes, until you're a content creator that is de facto knocked off the air because of Content ID, without any of the due process that copyright law actually demands.
Put in another context, should we get rid of net neutrality because Comcast ought to have the right to decide what content goes over its pipes?
Then this limited "freedom of speech", a provincial americanism based on a historical accident (the first amendment), is not the full freedom of speech the philosophers of enlightenment, artists, activists, etc., described.
>If people don't like what you have to say, or how you are saying it, they are free to walk away
In this case, they weren't free to walk away, they were thrown out, regardless of whether what was said was popular or not.
If we allow those with internet platforms to decide what's ok to be written, we're regressing before the enlightenment.
It doesn't matter if someone can "create their own platform". A right to free speech should include the ability to talk in the popular platforms of the day, the "marketplace of ideas". Nobody should be guaranteed an audience, but nobody should be denied a place to speak and potentially gather one.
(Of course big private interests have all the space they want in their own owned platforms, from TV channels and websites, to press and social media -- for them there's no "make your own website to spew your shit", they already have all of them -- and they get to pick who gets to participate in them).
Also note that just because the wind today is pro-progressive, and people you like (like the Patreon guy) get to dictate who says what and what's not to be said on their properties, it doesn't mean it will always be this way. The liberal twenties in Germany were followed by Nazism. The 60's and early 70's in the US were followed by Reagan. Consider freedom of speech practices that should apply now and later, when progressives don't have the same clout.
Isn't that more or less the argument against Net Neutrality? Why must the pipes carry all content without favor, but content aggregators are free to discriminate against viewpoints?
I don't know if it's centralisation so much as personification. Patreon wants to be a a friendly brand, part of people's self-image. And having chosen this, perhaps they can't afford to live and let live.
It's very difficult to imagine Bell Telephone (in their 100% monopoly days I mean) feeling responsible for what people discuss on their wires, or feeling a need to deny (say) pornographers service so that its other customers wouldn't feel tainted. Or Visa likewise today -- it's understood that other people will use the same plastic to pay for things you morally disapprove of, just as they could use cash. But it's positioned as a neutral carrier, and nobody cares (I think).
Personification makes sense to me, at least in regards to Patreon. But then you get to Youtube...a stroll through the comment section of any video makes you realize you're in the digital version of Mos Eisley. There is no brand to protect, yet they wave their censorship wand quite often, including just this last week (https://www.businessinsider.com/r-youtube-under-pressure-for...). It seems a lot of these videos weren't violating any Youtube policies, they were deleted "just because."
> Or Visa likewise today -- it's understood that other people will use the same plastic to pay for things you morally disapprove of, just as they could use cash. But it's positioned as a neutral carrier, and nobody cares (I think).
Heh, well I hope so. But that recent NYTimes story[0] about how mass shootings used guns and ammo bought with a credit card makes me unsure about that. I'd have thought using cash vs credit was more or less interchangeable, and either the person should be allowed to buy the firearms or not. But given the focus on how it was bought, makes me think there's some movement towards expecting Visa and the like to not be simply neutral facilitators of transactions.
Visa is extremely censorious, especially of sexual content. It is very odd how they and MasterCard get let off this debate, despite the fact their vague rules are often the reason for such closedowns.
It will be really interesting to see if 2019 brings a change in the outrage that is currently directed at public facing platforms over their content policies to the actual architects of many of those decisions, which are Visa/MC and a handful of advertising brokers.
We can argue about the role of individual platforms, but Visa/MC in particular have a cast iron, long term monopoly with much stronger effects on the public than any national government does. Their editorial policies should be under huge public scrutiny.
I'm always a bit surprised by people who want to bring up historical analogies without admitting that the US has a long history of censorship; if anything, the type of hard-line free-speech stance assumed by many internet forum posters is an incredibly recent development in American law. And both public (enforced by law) and private (enforced by industry associations or the like) censorship regimes continue to exist in the US today.
Bell Telephone was a peer-to-peer communications infrastructure, not a publishing platform. To the extent that it did provide a medium for publication (the phonebook), they absolutely had standards for what could be published. Were those standards arbitrary? Was the Jewish Defamation League allowed to have their business listed, or advertise?
And having chosen this, perhaps they can't afford to live and let live.
This is how oppression operates. First it's, "Well, we'd live and let live, but we can't afford the consequences if we serve you." Then it will be, "We can't afford the consequences if we're at all associated with you." Then it will be, "We can't afford the consequences if we don't loudly support the 'right' things." Finally, it will become, "We can't afford the consequences if we don't turn you in."
> It's very difficult to imagine Bell Telephone (in their 100% monopoly days I mean) feeling responsible for what people discuss on their wires, or feeling a need to deny (say) pornographers service so that its other customers wouldn't feel tainted.
Bell in its monopoly days was a common carrier [0], regulated by law to treat all phone lines equally.
> Or Visa likewise today -- it's understood that other people will use the same plastic to pay for things you morally disapprove of, just as they could use cash. But it's positioned as a neutral carrier, and nobody cares (I think).
Visa and Mastercard are not common carriers - they can and do discriminate.
One of the weirdest ironies in this debate is that the people Patreon is ending business relationships with tend to be libertarian/conservative types who are generally skeptical of government regulation of business. And yet what they really seem to want is regulation of Patreon, Twitter [1], Cloudflare [2], etc as common carriers.
Centralization isn't the problem here, if you look back at history there are more platforms for people to speak their mind than ever before. Before you the internet you had to deal with the three major networks to get on TV and most exterme speech, on either end of the spectrum, was relegated to the fringes.
There has always been a realm of discourse that society agrees upon and that we use to set the boundaries of conversation, just a few decades ago anti-Semitism and racism were allowed and now it isn't, overall this is a good thing.
There are more platforms than ever available to you if you want to express your fringe ideas, each of the platforms has the right to ban you if it goes against what they stand for. Everyone who uses the platforms understands the risks, I don't understand where all this pearl clutching is coming from.
> Centralization isn't the problem here, if you look back at history there are more platforms for people to speak their mind than ever before.
But there aren't. It's an illusion of diversity.
They're all owned or being bought up by the same centralized handful of outfits-turned-conglomerates that have always controlled the means of distribution. Haven't you noticed the flurry of mergers (successful or not) in the last 10-15 years?
You see a similar pattern every time Reddit bans a community. People wring their hands about free speech, how ideas should be "argued with, not silenced", how banning "controversial" subreddits will just be counterproductive in the long run, and how the community will suffer because the marketplace of ideas is stifled by censorship. The concerns may be worth discussing in good faith every time something like this happens, but reading what Sargon of Akkad actually said makes these concerns seem a little absurd in context. The pearl-clutching seems to get amplified and repeated by trolls who know that it represents a long-term defeat of them and their ideas.
If you want to talk about a "marketplace of ideas," this is just an example of how it works in practice. Alex Jones or users of /r/FatPeopleHate etc. are 100% legally allowed to spread their ideas in most countries and therefore still participate in this "marketplace". However, consumers themselves find certain actions and ideas repulsive and last year's young and vulnerable males have perhaps grown up a little, so websites are trying to read the market and get ahead of the curve before a smart competitor can pick up those consumers by advertising "we don't allow content like that on this platform, but you can find it on Patreon if you really want."
If the concerns about Patreon's censorship that we're seeing in this thread were really as valid as their prevalence should indicate then Reddit banning subs like /r/FatPeopleHate and /r/CoonTown might have led to Reddit's downfall a long time ago (like how very many redditors predicted), and Voat.co would be a flowering bastion of ideas and content from people drawn to its promise of unadulterated free speech. Instead Voat is a second-rate, hostile finge community while Reddit is only gaining prominence as a website. That doesn't seem to be changing anytime soon.
The same thing would happen to any "alternative" Patreon, so for very many powerful members of this "anti-feminist"/"new right"/"Intellectual Dark Web" I think they might see this as writing on the wall for them and their entire movement. Maybe what they're afraid of in the long run is that their ideas simply don't stand up to scrutiny and without access to a sufficiently large mainstream community where the law of averages would budget them a steady stream of converts they would steadily lose members and just fizzle out on some forgotten corner of the internet.
On the other hand, at what point do we accept that we have different viewpoints and live and let live?
When society gets to a point that it decides internet access is a basic necessity, and not a luxury that can be shut off by a company when a random middle manager decides.
To use your example, DS is a terrible thing. But its electric provider will never shut off its juice for being too controversial.
Its water will not be cut off because of its views.
Its heating oil fuel will keep being delivered, because the oil distributor hasn't decided to impose its leaders' morals on others, and punish those it disagrees with by withholding its service.
As long as the internet is "optional," then the vast majority and chattering masses won't complain about a small group of people cutting off smaller groups of people.
I can't wrap my brain around the notion of the water company shutting off an extremist group's taps.
All those examples are far simpler in their structure than the internet though. Because so far I've not seen anyone actually banned from the internet. I've seen people banned from private websites, I've seen people banned from fund-raising platforms, I've even seen people banned from hosting companies but none of those are analogous to having your taps turned off.
Trying to prevent people from arguing for an evil (E) never stops E long term. It should be fought with reason and counter-arguments, not with silencing the speaker. Suppressing the speaker can indicate, especially to those wavering, that there are no reasonable counter-arguments and there must be something true in the message that controlling powers are trying to suppress.
There are different modes: I do not have to give someone I strongly dislike the freedom to preach at my home. However, if I have a media content distribution business, and allow creators freedom to create their own message I should also tolerate content that I personally dislike; otherwise I risk my business to morph from content distribution into society manipulation. "I disapprove of what you say, but will defend your right to say it". Patreon is wrong. My 2c.
You cannot argue against people that believe an entire race or an entire people should be systematically eradicated. There is no rational argument to be had against them because they specifically argue on an entirely different level.
They want you to treat them at equal in the world of debate because that's how their views are legitimized and given power. I find it honestly disturbing that people are more willing to defend the 'ironic' people calling for the death of their enemies than the minorities trying to get them to stop.
It's asymmetric. It takes years to build a skyscraper but seconds to destroy one. Hate, appealing to biases, low-effort ideas, and emotion-based reasoning are much easier to spread than to refute. Is racism common because people just haven't heard a good rebuttal to it?
Those who argue in bad faith will spread viral speech resistant to good faith counterarguments. To assume that these people are just missing the correct information is to assume that we are dealing with purely rational minds. No amount of reasoning will change a bad-faith argument.
I think a lot of the discussion about free speech values need to consider the context of our changing world. The rhetorical battlefield of the modern world is no longer as we know it. Perhaps it made more sense in the past to simply fight ideas with ideas, since schools of thought were more centralized and ideas spread slowly, getting filtered and curated along the way. Today, there is instantaneous spreading of ideas to every corner of the world. The things people hear about are not the best ideas, but rather the most transmittable ideas. Our society has spent billions of dollars cultivating the mind virus industry, and they have discovered very powerful techniques for spreading dangerous pathogens. Facts alone do not cure a mind infected with emotionally-rooted lies. We need stronger immune systems.
And while education is indeed one part of the picture, having more opportunities for empathy and having stronger cultural standards are another. Restricting this kind of speech sets the standard that some ideas are not compatible with a modern society. However, I agree that this method is flawed: it creates the perception of persecution and martyrdom, and uncomfortably concentrates power. I think modern progressive thinking needs to focus more on a sort of empathetic education rather than going all in on an antagonistic shaming approach.
>"Trying to prevent people from arguing for an evil (E) never stops E long term. It should be fought with reason and counter-arguments, not with silencing the speaker. Suppressing the speaker can indicate, especially to those wavering, that there are no reasonable counter-arguments and there must be something true in the message that controlling powers are trying to suppress."
This "marketplace of ideas" and the idea that fascism can be argued away is demonstrably not working. Trying to engage a True Believer in debate simply lets them use the exposure to spread their ideology, they and their adherents simply feed on the controversy.
That's why a large segment of the alt-right run around daring people to "debate" them, because they know all exposure is good exposure, when it comes to the segment they're targeting.
By debating fascists, you implicitly give credence to the notion that their ideology is valid and worthy of civil discourse, when it is in fact the direct opposite of free speech and freedom for all.
Trying to prevent people from arguing for an evil works much better when the primary reason they are arguing for said evil is because your platform makes it insanely profitable for them to do so.
"I disapprove of what you say but will do my level best to ensure it's profitable for you and your copycats to keep saying it in a more and more attention-seekingly extreme manner" sounds suspiciously like the net result is society manipulation of a different sort. Ultimately I think private organizations have a right to have the time, effort and money they invest in growing their platform's reach decoupled from the change in the public profile of evil.
> The societal norms are shifting to a place where there are certain topics that are not allowed to be discussed at all even if looking at them from a critical lens.
Patreon want to prevent the expression of certain thoughts. For example, they are against "negative generalizations, of people based on their race". However, negative generalisations are sometimes true. For example the homicide rate in Japan is much lower than in Jamaica; from this it follows that Jamaicans are on average more homicidal than Japanese. That's a negative generalisation. It's also true.
I wouldn't mind that Patreon are censorious, if there were lots of alternatives. But that brings me to your other point:
> Centralization is the real evil, here.
This is the real problem, plus the fact that internet-based services tend to become centralised, due to network effects, high fixed costs and low variable costs.
I'm not sure what the solution is. Encouraging decentralisation seems to me a bit like trying to make water run uphill: you can do it, but it's an effort and as soon as you stop, the water just runs back downhill.
> I wouldn't mind that Patreon are censorious, if there were lots of alternatives.
Good luck with that. The Visa MasterCard cartel will not allow a Patreon competitor with different standards to use their payment infrastructure and will use their connections to get any competitor kicked off of other payment processors.
It’s been two weeks and SubscribeStar still don’t have a replacement for the eight payment processors that dropped them all at once after they took on Carl Benjamin.
Patreon would have backed down by now if that was an option.
It’s all about the payment processors, as you’ll figure out pretty quickly if you read this transcript of a call between the head of Patreon’s Censorship team and one of their creators.
"For example the homicide rate in Japan is much lower than in Jamaica; from this it follows that Jamaicans are on average more homicidal than Japanese. That's a negative generalisation. It's also true."
To me, a generalization is where you infer that because a general fact exists (e.g. the homicide rate) there is consequently a more specific fact about each member of a group. I feel like you have stopped short of actually making a generalization, or are leaving it ambiguous as to whether you have made one. If the homicide rate implies something about each Jamaican, what does it imply? I find the equivocation over such matters more viscerally irritating than the racism itself.
> For example the homicide rate in Japan is much lower than in Jamaica; from this it follows that Jamaicans are on average more homicidal than Japanese. That's a negative generalisation. It's also true.
That is not true. The fact you presented might be true, but the statement that "Jamaicans are on average more homicidal than Japanese" is not identical to the fact about homicide rates.
Your statement implies that those two groups of people are somehow differing in temperament such that one has more violent tendencies than the other.
The reality is that there are many complicating factors, and your statement removes enough of those that it no longer is true.
For example, a similar but more obviously false statement from the same vein: "It is a fact that americans have more total car accidents than the ancient greeks. Therefore, the americans are worse drivers than the ancient greeks" (or similarly "more americans own cars and have no accidents than ancient greeks, so it follows americans are better drivers). The obvious confounding factor there is the fact that ancient greece had no cars, but it follows an identical pattern to your statement. It starts with a simple fact, and then creates a phrase which neatly avoids all confounding factors and has a negative implication that relates to the fact, but ignores how complex reality is.
I think that if you, in seriousness, made a statement like your example, you can and should be banned from platforms. You're mis-using facts to represent one culture as more violent than another, and implying that it's a trait of the people, not a much more complicated result of economic and legal differences. It's an incredibly racist and insidious thing to say.
We live in a world where corporate entities have an extraordinary control over our lives, what opinions we see and hear, even if we actively seek out those opinions. At some point we need to stop thinking about free speech as simply a guarantee against government intrusion, but also a guarantee against our increasingly powerful corporate overlords.
This echoes my thoughts as well. Consider the following: If a democratically elected government which is beholden to the wills of the people by (generally) fair elections cannot be trusted to wield the powers of censorship responsibly, then why on Earth should we trust tech companies beholden to no one but their shareholders to wield that power responsibly?
>The biggest one for me in recent history was Cloudflare arbitrarily deciding to stop hosting the Daily Stormer. Sure, DS is vile, but at the point we start enforcing censorship on a whim instead of hardened policies that aren't selectively enforced, I think it becomes worrisome.
In fairness, that was actually DS's fault. They went and said "everyone else has banned us, but cloudflare hasn't. Cloudflare agree with what we stand for".
Cloudflares CEO responded by saying "It would be an objectivly bad thing for the world if I used my position as CEO of cloudflare to censor information and opinions. However, if DS's public standpoint is that if I'm not against them I must be with them, then I'm /definitely/ against them".
I think that's reasonable enough, it's pretty cheeky for DS to attempt to usurp cloudflares good name, and totally appropriate for cloudflare to push them under a bus as a response.
>So what do we do? I don't know. Privately-owned services should be free to censor. People should also continue to speak freely (if legal).
I wrote a long version of an answer to this, but it started to ramble a lot. Short version: once someone has 50% of the planet as a customer base, as facebook does, they're not a private company any more, they're a public utility. Even with a much smaller userbase, a company could be acting like a public utility in some countries. We should drop regulation and auditing on them like a tonne of bricks, same as we do other de-facto monopolies like the tax department. If companies don't want that, they should work to generate a marketplace of options for customers.
> once someone has 50% of the planet as a customer base, as facebook does, they're not a private company any more, they're a public utility
Thanks, that's a really interesting take on the problem, and I tend to agree. It seems that once something becomes infrastructure (however that would be defined...either by your 50% rule or something more nuanced) it becomes heavily regulated, or at least governed by the principals of net neutrality.
I think you're way way way overthinking this. The bottom line is that an online service can ban any user for any reason, period. Just because a service is popular doesn't mean that you have a right to use it. If you don't like how a company operates their business, then you can start a boycott or use a competitor.
> the world handing them the reigns.
Nobody is handing anyone the reigns. Patreon didn't even exist a few years ago, and now we're debating whether or not free speech is in peril because someone was banned from it. It's the same thing with people who get incensed over twitter bans... who cares? These are just arbitrary business... these things just don't really matter.
"The bottom line is that an online service can ban any user for any reason, period. "
Agreed.
And the govt (US and EU) can break them up whenever they they attain market monopoly. Or governments (every other one) can decide they've had enough with arbitrary content control by foreigners and ban their service within their borders.
Which is fine, really. I dont b%^h about FB and friends kicking someone out of their service. I expect the enlightened not to b^&h when countries ban services they like.
The Internet as we knew it in the 90s is dead. Time to get over it.
> So what do we do? I don't know. Privately-owned services should be free to censor. People should also continue to speak freely (if legal). I certainly think Net Neutrality is essential at this point, whether enforced via public infrastructure or some kind of over-arching regulation. But, there's not much anyone can do in the current framework of things other than encourage decentralization. And I do, when I can.
Having more foundational internet infrastructure and services controlled by the government (which IS bound by freedom of speech rules) would also solve this issue.
But the ironic thing here, is that most of the right-leaning people complaining about being kicked off platforms, would oppose doing this.
They also oppose private platforms being told how to behave by the government, as it happens, they're just complaining in this particular case because here that works against them.
This is a great comment. Honestly love the nuanced take, far too rare.
The only point I would respectfully ad is that I'm not sure if we can enforce decentralization. Many markets, like payment services (like Visa, Paypal), tend towards a few large companies. Personally, I think the first amendment is an example where we as a society (at least in the US) said that people's freedom of expression trumps people's freedom from discomfort. I'd apply the same standard to corporations. That said, I'm also still torn about whether it is right to impose that view on corporations. In a perfect world, I agree that enough decentralization that no single group can censor people's views is the best solution.
I think you're right, many things tend toward centralization, large networks and infrastructure (and sometimes difficult-to-solve problems) being among them.
I personally "feel" (because I can't really form a hardened ideology around it) that the closer things get to infrastructure, the more neutral they should be. In other words, the more difficult it is to spin up a competitor to Company A, the more Company A should actively work to not censor or shape messages or ideas.
I also agree we cannot enforce decentralization. My hope is that one day, we can see the benefits of it as a people and collectively decide to go that route without coercion of any kind. Wishful thinking, probably =]. That won't stop me from trying to convince others of the benefits, though.
This is the crux of it. I have a very low opinion of all these people, "anti-feminists" and whatever else, but this sort of drama does illustrate that we have a problem with just a few entities being in a position to stifle the speech of a large number of people. It doesn't seem great, regardless of whether some of its present manifestations appear to be good.
On the flip side, these marginal voices never really had an effective mouthpiece in the past, so maybe the net effect is not significant. But I worry that we will miss opportunities for unique individual expression that the internet, in theory, could provide.
Strange how I never see this argument for allowing people to yell fire in a crowded theater. Perhaps because the people who make these arguments are likely to be harmed in the theater but not by the violent racists. Would they be willing to defend platforming anti-Christian rhetoric in Bangladesh while living there?
Societal rules like "free speech" are not black and white. They are muddy distillations of enlightened self-interest, where each person tries to impose rules on others to reduce their own chances of being harmed. Thus, the European states and the USA all have laws against murder but draw their lines on protected speech differently based on what makes sense in their societies.
The only reason Americans find this so hard to understand is that they are drilled with hero worship for the nation's founders from Kindergarten, much like a North Korean child will be trained to deify the Kim family. The reality is that the documents these men produced were compromises suited to their time, and electoral colleges and 3/5 compromises are not timeless truths for governing.
> On the one hand, Patreon shouldn't have to do business with people they don't like. On the other hand, at what point do we accept that we have different viewpoints and live and let live?
Why are those different hands? I can accept that you have a different viewpoint, and that you should be free to express it and people should be free to do business with you, without myself choosing to do business with you. That is, accepting Patreon’s action here is a model of accepting different viewpoints with a live-and-let-live attitude, not an opposed alternative to it.
> To me, personally and anecdotally, this seems to be happening with increasing velocity.
It's not, it's just now sometimes biting the right-wing ideologies that historically have for decades directed private and public censorship in every institution of American life (and whose values are still codified in many systems of private and public censorship), so it actually stands out from the expected background more.
> Then you see counter-arguments, like "well if you don't want to get banned, don't say bad things!"
That's a very strawman-ish way to discuss matters. I won't deny that a few people think that way, but it is neither the only, nor the strongest counter-argument.
It is frustrating to see rising intolerance of speech in the culture. Yes, Patreon has the right to decline to do business with people they don't like.
What they absolutely ought not do - and what Patreon might perhaps be held contractually responsible for, here - is to hide the ball and not be transparent about their reasons for removing people.
This recurring theme is now showing up on a regular basis in social media - opaque rules of morality that you have to guess at and appear to be enacted at the platform's whim. If there are groups they don't want on board, they should say so. I suspect they don't because they fear the fragmentation and competition that laying those rules down would encourage.
What this article fails to mention, is that Patreon lied about why Benjamin was banned. He did NOT violate their TOS.
Patreon dishonestly tried to retroactively apply an amended TOS to justify banning him, after the fact.
This demonstrates that Patreon is a dishonest company that will ban you because they feel like it, and then also try to take the high ground and pretend that they are just following their own rules and or trying to keep people safe, when both of those are not true.
And the NYTimes calling Benjamin's awkward and poorly chosen words "hate speech" is frankly libelous. However, even if they were hate speech, Patreon specifically allows so-called "hate speech", as long as it is not on their site.
Am I factually incorrect? NO. Patreon should not be trusted with anyone's money, because they will make up new rules on the spot, and ban you for things that were not against their own rules. How long until Patreon decides that they don't have to give refunds anymore?
IIRC someone high up in the daily stormer publicly claimed cloudflare supported their views due to not being taken down. That lead to a decision to stop hosting them which I think is more reasonable than just censorship.
The reason why Patreon et. al. are deplatforming people who make reprehensible statements, it's because they risk losing ad revenue. Other companies will stop running ads if they risk them popping up on Uncle Joe's Lynchin' & White Sheets page. It's a purely profit-motivated move.
As long as people and corporations are motivated solely by profit, you will see this move to "truth in the middle" milquetoast centrist presentation, in order to not offend the advertisers and shareholders.
Reading your comment I was struck by how similar this is to the War on Drugs. Drugs we find objectionable enough to ban and criminalize don't go away; they just go to the next scarier place that will have them - which is to say, the next scarier dudes willing to risk supplying them - which is to say, actual criminals, who are almost always involved in other worse things than just supplying an agricultural commodity or extract thereof.
I choose to see it as an opportunity for the players that wish to take on the challenge of providing another platform that will cater to those who wish to pay for a given service without concern for the information being posted, assuming it does not violate the values behind the Golden Rule. As long as there is no coercion, let people come to their own agreements.
I appreciate free speech, it allows me to read/hear opposing viewpoints so I can reevaluate what I currently believe so I can make sure I still have confidence in my chosen belief systems.
This is why I will make the time to talk to people of faith different than mine, as well as why I pay attention to news/conversations from other countries, as well as differing political parties in my own country (USA).
I enjoy critical thinking, and it can only be done thoroughly with ample sources of data.
Good luck with that when Visa and MasterCard wil kick you off their payment processing network and get other payment processors to do the same within hours. Cartel behaviour, right? SubscribeStar had eight payment processors. Now it has none.
Transcript of a call from Patreon’s Censorship department and a creator. It doesn’t take much reading between the lines to know it’s payment processors.
Cloudflare is not water or oxygen. It is a business. They can and should fire customers that violate their standards in the same way that drunk assholes can and should get kicked out of Denny's.
Those kicked out are free to start their own businesses.
No censorship is occurring in these cases.
What's weird about private enforcement of censorship is there's no transparency into how a bill becomes a law or an idea at a meeting becomes policy. How exactly did they come to their conclusion to censor these people? It was likely a secret trial, with secret evidence, secret witnesses and secret laws that being a confidential meeting between department heads. When we move more governance decisions to the private sector we embed more secrecy and arbitrariness into our governance.
Then you see counter-arguments, like "well if you don't want to get banned, don't say bad things!" But then, who decides what's bad?
I've been banned from or chosen to leave multiple platforms. The crux of the issue: I have an incurable medical condition that I manage with diet and lifestyle. I've gotten off all the drugs I'm supposed to be on.
I get viciously attacked by others. When I complained to the mods on other platforms (not HN), I have been told their ugly attacks, in clear violation of the rules, are fine and I'm the problem.
I've been told I'm crazy. I've been told I have Munchausen, never mind that Munchausen involves faking illness for attention and my claim is I'm getting healthier. I've had people maliciously suggest that my son, who has the same diagnosis I have, is a product of incest.
I mean, this is ugly stuff. There's zero justification for some of the things that have been said to me.
I've worked hard at trying to figure out how to tread lightly, be very polite and respectful, etc. But, when all is said and done, the unforgivable offense appears to be that I'm a dirt-poor former homemaker who spent several years homeless who claims to have solved a problem that doctors and scientists can't figure out.
So, basically, speaking the truth about my life makes me persona non grata. I can find no way forward for what's an acceptable way to try to talk to people about any of this. Even without trying to promote solutions or make money from it, simply trying to talk to people in public forums about this stuff is essentially a bannable offense in many places.
I've spent years trying to not end up like Semmelweis:* committed to an asylum and dead because of it for trying to say "Hey, world, I think I know something medically useful."
I don't know what the solution is. But every time I see an article about someone being banned from a platform and saying they really don't have other options and this is a threat to their livelihood, etc, I'm extremely sympathetic. I was homeless for years and asking how I can make money online and essentially being told by a lot of people to STFU and GTFO, people who like to see themselves as good and kind and generous and making the world a better place.
This was a potentially life-threatening situation for me. This was tantamount to attempted murder by shunning.
If you have no ability to access income and everyone tries to send you away, when you run out of places to go, you know, death becomes a very real possibility.
I don't have solutions. But I'm reluctant to say "Well, those people just need to behave." What does that even mean if you can find yourself in the same shoes as them for getting healthier and trying to figure out how to discuss that with people?
>Centralization is the real evil, here. Why are we giving companies and people the right to silence vast amounts of voices and opinions on random whims?
This is likely a factor in why there aren't any serious "politically neutral" competitors to Patreon. Even if you could limit your attack surface in terms of third party services like Cloudflare you couldn't get by without a payment processor.
> On the other hand, at what point do we accept that we have different viewpoints and live and let live?
I think you're asking a good question but I think that because Patreon uses a very human-centric process that starts with "hey, let's have a conversation", it may not be the right place to ask it.
If you are unwilling to have a conversation with your platform, you probably have a problem.
An interesting view point on this, if there was collusion between Patreon and Paypal over what subsequently happened to subscribe star, it could violate anti-trust law.
I argue that by your own ideal state of decentralization, the current system should be working perfectly fine for you regardless of private companies censoring X, Y, and Z.
The "fully decentralized" internet can (does?) already currently exist today alongside our usual youtube/facebook/cloudflare/etc centralized internet. The state of centralization is entirely by user choice, not by force.
Literally the only necessary component for a decentralized internet is net neutrality - that packets are delivered without systematic blocking or throttling on the basis of content. And net neutrality, while in danger, hasn't AFAIK devolved to blocking sites for objectionable content (not yet in the west anyways)
In other words, theres a very clear answer to your conundrum of "at what point do we accept that we have different viewpoints and live and let live?". Regardless of political views or whatever else, your content ought to be routable on the internet. Everything else that we as a society have built on top of that (edge caching, content platforms, delivery systems, heck throw in DNS while we're at it) are unnecessary for a decentralized internet, so if you piss off society and nobody wants to do business with you, maybe it's fine if you're on your own.
Of course, you also argue "there are problems that people have, and things that need to be talked about, but they aren't allowed to say anything about it". That's an understandable position, but should be considered unrelated to the issue of centralized vs decentralized -- I would still not want to argue with some race-baiting troll, even if I hosted my own content instead of uploading it to youtube. I would still ban them, ignore them, blacklist them, or whatever options exist in the decentralized internet.
>The societal norms are shifting to a place where there are certain topics that are not allowed to be discussed at all even if looking at them from a critical lens
This isn't really any different from the majority of human history. Private speech - available through a text message or a DM - is still pretty unregulated (and likely will remain that way - for example iMessage is end-to-end encrypted and I suspect any chat service that moderates private messages would run into issues maintaining users). Public speech has always been heavily regulated by those who hold power - whether it's the FCC regulating TV content or being snubbed from the community when you advocate a particularly unsavory opinion at a town gathering.
So then maybe the problem is that more and more of our speech is "public speech" (like a facebook post) and not "private speech" (like a facebook direct message), and hence in practice more and more speech is being censored. I could agree with this. But that's neither a centralization problem nor a censorship problem.
Thanks, that's a great deconstruction of my argument. It seems one of the problems I have is cultural (censorship being increasingly thought of as acceptable) and the other a proposed solution to the problem as it exists solely on the internet. And you're right, the internet is already decentralized...it's just the things built on top of it that are mostly centralized.
I guess my viewpoint is that decentralized services (accessible enough that they don't require someone to run a server in their basement) can somewhat curtail the problem of cultural censorship. In other words, I think the average person should be able to publish what they want (no matter how stupid) without specialized knowledge and without being censored. That is what I envision.
Will this help the problem with cultural censorship? I really don't know. I just believe in the free exchange of ideas.
That said, and as others have brought up in the discussion, the banking system (Visa et al) engage in censorship fairly often as well...so the problem is certainly not limited to internet.
I guess my post is more of a general observation and complaint than a coherent idea of what should be done. But it's good to at least separate out the parts that aren't really related and argue them as separate pieces =].
> The biggest one for me in recent history was Cloudflare arbitrarily deciding to stop hosting the Daily Stormer. Sure, DS is vile, but at the point we start enforcing censorship on a whim instead of hardened policies that aren't selectively enforced, I think it becomes worrisome.
If there's a fairly cogent set of guidelines I'm fine with it. I realize that it's subjective but we're not idiots and it's THEIR company.
If you went to a friends house and he had a nazi meeting in his basement you wouldn't accept "free speech" as a reason for them to be there - you'd think your friend was a Nazi.
> Sure, DS is vile, but at the point we start enforcing censorship on a whim instead of hardened policies that aren't selectively enforced, I think it becomes worrisome.
This is a mistake; but don't worry, it's a common mistake. The mistake is to assume that human-constructed ontologies are actually capable of describing the real world, and thus that we can come up with laws or rules that CAN be assiduously (and not selectively) enforced.
This is simply wrong; laws are human constructions made up of language, an imperfect instrument that has no power by itself. There is NO WAY to apply laws without interpretation by the enforcer. It is up to some set of people we designate as agents of the law to decide what the application is.
The same is true of any rule-based system, legal or extra-legal. The rule set by itself can only provide a guide; it requires human judgement to make the rule set work in a particular scenario. Cf. Potter Stewart's famous pronouncement about obscenity:
>I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description ["hard-core pornography"], and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.
Since it requires judgement to apply the abstract rule to the particular situation, it means enforcement, by its very nature, must be "selective", and there must always be an arbitrary element to it. That is, judgement, being produced by individuals with their own biases and history which they must necessarily bring to bear on the question, is always questionable.
We have mechanisms to mitigate this problem - mostly precedent and review, i.e., amortizing the problem of individual judgement over several individuals to smooth out the bumps, and recall - the ability to reject individual enforcers. But again, these mechanisms are imperfect (who watches the watchmen, and what makes those watchers any more credible, by the way?).
What's my fucking point? It's that when we begin on this quest, we should recognize our fundamental limit: we CANNOT produce an ideal solution, we are limited by metaphysics itself (the world is larger than we have words to describe). It behooves us to see, then, that the solutions we DO arrive at must be full of compromise, and must recognize all of the ways in which our system is subject to failure.
Your post, then, is a good step along this way. If what we are doing becomes worrisome, good - that worry is a check on whatever authority we have put in place, and your subjective judgements being brought to bear are a way to control the arbitrariness of authority.
But, at the end of the day, all we can really do is worry harder, speak louder, and shape and reshape our institutions, constantly trying to get them to fit the - ever-shifting - landscape of our morality.
See also: Richard Rorty, who was very fond of observing that human society is made up of ugly half-compromises.
> Also, for the record, I'm a feminist, left-leaning socialist. So good luck writing me off as another conservative windbag who doesn't understand the first amendment that's crowing about censorship.
Well, that's all well and good; but I do notice that on Hacker News there is a very strong tendency to only report and discuss this kind of thing when it affects "conservative windbags" or people with terrible long-discredited ideas or campaigns against individual women.
It's also well worth discussion "stochastic terrorism", the phenomenon by which injecting hate material into public discussion will eventually cause someone to take it seriously. If you say "carthago delenda est" often enough someone will carry out a mass shooting in Carthage.
As I recall Hacker News also had a very lengthy discussion when Patreon banned pornography, which I wouldn't say was effecting "conservative windbags". In fact I recall it was argued this move disproportionately affected the LGBT community, which evidently often crowdfunds their pornography. A similarly lengthy discussion was had for a similar story concerning Tumblr.
In response to accusations of bias, dang has stated something along the lines that people tend to view HN as having a bias contrary to their own, no matter what their own happens to be. From what I've seen that rings true.
The predominant viewpoint of most HN posters seems to lean towards some idealized form of anarcho-capitalist libertarianism. Although there are definitely a few leftists and conservatives in the mix.
Seems we haven’t figured out how to draw the correct distinctions between what are clearly different types of businesses.
If Patreon is a gallery or art market or auction house, and Reddit is a Café, what is Cloudflare? Are they a toll road? Private highway? Something else?
Likening any of those businesses to the closest brick and mortar equivalent is probably futile, but bear with me a moment.
In the real world, businesses generally do business on their own terms. If they don’t own their own property, they lease it, and the municipality they are in zones the land and enforces certain regulations. There might be a couple of other factors, the United States has determined race to not be a valid criteria for whether you allow them into your public facing establishment. Mostly we don’t allow sex segregation, but there are exceptions here too, like with public baths.
A Café owner has an enormous amount of leeway with who they will do business with though. By and large they can ask people to leave, or to not come back so long as the determining factor isn’t discrimination against a protected class. They can compare properties, including landlords, neighborhoods and zoning regulations. If they want to target a particular demographic, it can be as simple as making the menu bilingual or playing a particular kind of music.
Now if someone builds a private road on their own property, that is their own business, but if they build a private road under contract to the city and charge people to use it, that is the city’s business. They can’t tell Nazis not to drive on that road anymore than the city can, assuming this city is in the United States anyway, but a Café owner could absolutely tell those same Nazis in that same city to not come in. Wouldn’t even have to give a reason for it. That’s fine, cafes exist everywhere and if you wanted to open one that catered specifically to Nazis, the law isn’t going to stop you.
I think we have knee jerk reactions when it comes to services like Cloudflare or Patreon disallowing certain people. To be honest, I tried to make a good case for why they should, but my best isn’t a particularly strong legal argument. Cloudflare and Patreon didn’t lay the cables that connect my home to the rest of the Internet, my ISP did, with a charter from my city.
Cloudflare and Patreon are businesses that work better when there is a critical mass of people already using them. They work best at-scale and don’t leave a whole lot of room in the market for competitors, Cloudflare much less so than Patreon, so in a sense they almost feel like utilities or like they should be.
They’re not utilities though, or cafes or galleries or any of that. They are private businesses though, so in that sense they are a lot closer to the Café owner than to your ISP or electric utility or the nearest private tollway. They might be hard to replicate businesses, and the people they are kicking off might find it hard to build a parallel alternative that sticks, but that is life.
That said, I much prefer businesses that are consistent in their policy enforcement practices than ones that aren’t, that is just good business.
I wrote my post with complete awareness of the fact that neo-nazis, and others like them, exist. I don't really see what your comment adds to the discussion.
Yes, some of the ideas are objectively bad. That doesn't mean there isn't a growing censorship movement, which incidentally often uses "nazi" lingo as an excuse to selectively silence people.
Also note that I gave a nod to, and firmly believe in, not inciting violence as a core tenet of free speech. Nazis can believe whatever vile shit they want to, as long as they don't act on it.
The danger in this point of view is that if not held to an extremely strict interpretation and substantial burden of evidence, this is indeed precisely how you end up getting eradications. The greatest irony though is that so often the people history comes to record as the 'bad guys' are the people who think they're the 'good guys' protecting society from some perceived eradication.
Think about things like the Spanish Inquisition or the Salem Witch Trials for extremely clear examples. These people didn't hate the people they were attacking. They'd just become so deluded in their own self righteousness that they thought they were saving society from immense evil. In reality though that evil existed only in their head. And while Don Quixote may have only swung at windmills, in these cases many people lost their lives for doing no wrong.
---
In reality the paradox of tolerance, as it is used in common rhetoric is completely nonsensical. Popper made an extremely clear distinction between words and violence that people often ignore when appealing to his argument. When a person moves from speech to unprovoked violence, eliminate that individual from society with the greatest of urgency and severity. Until, and after, that point - tolerance thrives without condition.
> Privately-owned services should be free to censor.
Yes, but they should also be free not to, so we really just need some companies with guts to make a payment processor that to the law, nothing more, and related platforms that do the same thing.
> there's not much anyone can do in the current framework of things other than encourage decentralization
But that is ultimately at odds with "hardened policies that aren't selectively enforced". A giant platform, like paypal + patreon without ANY meddling, or a giant payment processor and a bunch of big platforms that use it, that might not just be cheaper to run, it would solve the issue more or less (until they in turn get kicked off the net by cloudflare or something, but why assume that would happen at this point, seem prematurely pessimistic).
Decentralization is like "Linux on the desktop", whereas a payment processor that only respects the law really just requires money and people who can do it.
One possible take, or solution, to this dilemma is to establish that a service that chooses who to include or exclude based on the content (beyond what is required by the law) becomes a publisher. And as a publisher, it becomes responsible for everything that it makes available to its users.
So in the end a company would be put in front of a choice: either choose what to allow and reject, and become legally responsible for everything that is published; or act as a neutral intermediary and assume no responsibility for the contents. Sounds fair?
Yes, but please examine how the case becomes muddied with literally any level of nuance. Sargon of Akkad was deplatformed for using the n-word in a conversation criticizing a group of white-supremacists for behaving exactly like the people that they constantly classify as "n-words." He was literally using the term ironically, against white-supremacists, to show them how their own behaviors were exactly the sorts of behaviors they were attempting to classify as inferior and "black."
The man has hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of footage of his opinions online. He is not racist...at all. And yet here you are confidently and smugly declaring your comfort with his livelihood being taken away on the basis of his racism because the issue could not be simpler in your mind.
Racism is pretty common across the world. Sure, we could just decide to not talk to anyone that posts racist thoughts, but would the world really be better off?
First of all, unless you're a free speech absolutist (who believes that literally nothing supercedes free speech) then recognize and accept that someone, somewhere has to draw a line across a continuum of grey.
So we're already in the morass, whether you like it or not. You're right to worry about this question:
> But then, who decides what's bad?
But in this case, it's Patreon, trying to look out for its own best business interests. It's almost ideal. Since this is their core business they are pretty strongly incentivized to be liberal about what they allow.
You can imagine some kind of net neutrality regulation, but please realize that for it to have any effect it must be enforced. So we're talking about regulators, investigators, rulings, fines, appeals, legal defenses, etc., along with the attendant politics, of course, not to mention, soon you'll have entrenched interests to bog down any reforms or improvements to the system. Maybe as a left-leaning socialist you will be happy to hear about all this but just note that it doesn't resolve the fundamental issue. In the end, there's still a mixture of policy, enforcement, process and precedent deciding what's OK and what's not. Passing a law doesn't solve this issue, it just moves it around and probably makes it more complicated.
> The societal norms are shifting to a place where there are certain topics that are not allowed to be discussed at all
I'm not sure what you're talking about here. Anyway, this case seems to be about vigorous use of the n-word and homophobic slurs, which certainly can be discussed (and, unfortunately, are well accepted and encouraged in certain circles).
Also, keep in mind: moving the line of what is acceptable (whether to something more liberal or more conservative) doesn't change the situation at all. There are people who will test the line, wherever you draw it. In fact, for many, that's the point. They get attention (in their own circles) by testing the line and it's not bad to sometimes get banned as a result.
But in this case, it's Patreon, trying to look out for its own best business interests. It's almost ideal.
I agree with most of your comment, but is Patreon really free to make the decision? Assume a hypothetical "free speech absolutist" version of Patreon, who decided they wouldn't bow to outside pressure. It seems likely that that as with their short-lived free-speech-embracing competitors, the outside forces are strong enough that they would soon convince the credit card processors to refuse to continue serving them. Patreon isn't exactly forced to acquiesce, but they would have to decide that it's a hill worth dying on. Do you still view this larger picture as "almost ideal"?
>Then you see counter-arguments, like "well if you don't want to get banned, don't say bad things!" But then, who decides what's bad?
That's easy: whoever owns the platform.
If I own the platform, Daily Stormer isn't going to be using it. I don't want to be associated with those morons, so I'm not going to do business with them. If it's my platform and my business, I have every right to refuse to do business with those people.
If you want to be fair and equal and give everyone equal access no matter how vile their viewpoint, then you need to make a government service that doesn't discriminate. But then, you may have a big problem with the voters if the government is funding something the voters don't like. That's the nature of democratic governments: people collectively decide what they, as a nation and society, are going to allocate resources towards. So it's the voters' right to refuse to provide a platform for this unliked minority as well.
>So, there are problems that people have, and things that need to be talked about, but they aren't allowed to say anything about it.
If you feel that way, you have every right to set up your own platform and allow those people access to it. But if you're giving access to literal Nazis, I also have the right to shun you, which I will. If you want to willingly associate with that type of scum, then I'm going to assume that you're cut from the same cloth.
No, we don't need to make a government service that doesn't discriminate. We just need to designate things like payment processors and hosting providers as utilities. Your electric company, plumbing company, or mail carrier can't just choose not to do business with someone because they dislike their political views.
> If you feel that way, you have every right to set up your own platform and allow those people access to it. But if you're giving access to literal Nazis, I also have the right to shun you, which I will. If you want to willingly associate with that type of scum, then I'm going to assume that you're cut from the same cloth.
Who gets to decide what a "nazi" is? You?
What if I say you're a nazi? Your denials just make you more guilty. That's exactly what a nazi would say, nazi.
I don't understand why commenters in these threads keep noting that free speech only protects people from government censorship. This is a common, distracting, and empty statement. Proponents of free speech are pro free speech as a general concept and principle, beyond what protections are afforded under American law today. The idea of free speech predates the existence of the United States. Free speech is hugely valuable to defend, because what society finds acceptable or unacceptable is very much subjective and changes with time/location/culture/setting/leadership/etc. Having an open exchange of ideas is good and necessary for the long-term health and stability of society, especially if we care about being a collectively truth-seeking society.
There are also frequent comments on such articles saying that content creators can just seek another platform, which frankly seems like an obviously unhelpful suggestion. Twitter, Reddit, Patreon, and others are massive in scale and have a ubiquity and reach that isn't found elsewhere. Platforms that benefit from network effects don't face effective competition, and investors typically won't invest in new competitors in those arenas, because it is such a long shot to break through those barriers. We could argue that Patreon is not one of the platforms whose value is driven by network effects, but the underlying payment processors (e.g. Visa) definitely benefit from network effects. And of course, Visa has deplatformed many parties, including famously, Wikileaks back in 2010.
There are also examples of folks who followed that advice and left Patreon for other platforms (e.g. SubscribeStar) and then got deplatformed (e.g. by Stripe or PayPal). There are examples of lower-level entities like Visa/Mastercard _forcing_ platforms built on top of them to censor someone or risk being banned by them. Clearly, these privately-owned platforms are monopolies or oligopolies in a sense, holding access to large segments of the population with no competitive forces acting on them. Alternatively, we can look at them as being the digital public square, and therefore they should be subject to regulation that prevents them from taking action beyond what the law in their jurisdiction requires.
The big risk is this: when only a few entities funnel so much societal discourse or control our communication infrastructure or process payments, those entities making arbitrary decisions about who they serve has similar impacts/risks to the government imposing similar restrictions through the law. These companies should not act as a moral police and should not impose their own personal governance above what is minimally required by the law. Nor should they rely on the judgment of an angry mob to make decisions.
It's an interesting problem. Speech has never truly been free, sometimes and in some places its been regulated by government, but in modern liberal democracies its been regulated by culture. Polite society regulates speech by rejecting people who engage in whatever that society views as harmful speech.
Social media platforms and the internet generally, substantially weaken the power of culture to regulate speech in the way that it used to. I don't know what we do about this. We don't want government regulating speech, and it doesn't seem like allowing social media platforms to regulate it arbitrarily is particularly good either. But the gates that culture and localism placed on speech in the past did, seemingly, serve some useful purpose.
Do we want to live in a world where speech is truly unregulated, even by shame or culture? Maybe. It's possible that the answer here is yes we do, that sunlight is always the best disinfectant, and that the truth always emerges victorious in the end. But it's also possible that those things aren't true. I don't have an answer, but I don't think one way or the other is the obviously correct path forward either.
> Social media platforms and the internet generally, substantially weaken the power of culture to regulate speech in the way that it used to.
I fail to see how this is the case. It does absolutely grant the power to regulate speech. What Social media platforms have changes is that the people who are carrying out the informal regulation of speech have shifted to being a very narrow subset of the population, and one that is overwhelmingly made up of one category of culture. Tech, especially in the Bay Area, is effectively a political monoculture. Support for Republicans is often in the single digits[0].
The evidence really does indicate that sunlight is the best disinfectant. Despite the constant concern over Trump's comments on immigrants, for example, support for immigration in the US is at record levels.[1][2] Despite the concern over explicitly fascist rallies at Charlottesville and DC, these rallies actually cased a significant drop in support for far-right.[3] And lastly, while the Republican has become a party of Trump and has adopted much of his rhetoric the result has been largely bad for the party. They lost over a dozen seats in the midterm election - surprising given that the midterms are when the Republicans tend to do well.
Yes, sunlight is the best disinfectant, and the data demonstrates it. Ironic, then, that some would want to shield these views that they despise from said disinfectant.
Yes, "The idea of free speech predates the existence of the United States."
The idea of the freedom of association also predates the existence of the United States.
The freedom of association means that organizations get to exclude people from the association. Including because of their speech.
The phrase 'deplatform' rejects of the freedom of association.
Quoting from John Stuart Mill's "On Liberty", chapter IV, "Of the Limits to the Authority of Society Over the Individual"
> It would be a great misunderstanding of this doctrine, to suppose that it is one of selfish indifference, which pretends that human beings have no business with each other's conduct in life, and that they should not concern themselves about the well-doing or well-being of one another, unless their own interest is involved. ...
> We have a right, also, in various ways, to act upon our unfavourable opinion of any one, not to the oppression of his individuality, but in the exercise of ours. We are not bound, for example, to seek his society; we have a right to avoid it (though not to parade the avoidance), for we have a right to choose the society most acceptable to us. We have a right, and it may be our duty, to caution others against him, if we think his example or conversation likely to have a pernicious effect on those with whom he associates. We may give others a preference over him in optional good offices, except those which tend to his improvement. In these various modes a person may suffer very severe penalties at the hands of others, for faults which directly concern only himself; but he suffers these penalties only in so far as they are the natural, and, as it were, the spontaneous consequences of the faults themselves, not because they are purposely inflicted on him for the sake of punishment.
It is indeed possible "to extend the bounds of what may be called moral police, until it encroaches on the most unquestionably legitimate liberty of the individual", but what I'm pointing out is that you cannot simply look at "freedom of speech" as the sole or even paramount freedom under discussion.
"The big risk is this: when only a few entities funnel so much societal discourse or control our communication infrastructure or process payments, those entities making arbitrary decisions about who they serve has similar impacts/risks to the government imposing similar restrictions through the law."
So the problem isn't kicking haters off a private platform, it's that corporations have grown to large.
My take on the situation is this: internet-based communities can be analogized roughly to a privately-owned forum/market. Before I get into specifics, I realize that analogies are never 100% accurate, but I think they can help get the point across.
A business, Patreon, buys a building and sets up shop. They open booths for people to setup shop in and solicit funding for their projects. The general public can walk through the booths and choose who to support. This being a privately-owned business, and in their private property (building -> website or webserver), they reserve the right to deny entry to whomever they wish.
If I were a business owner, I would not want one of those booths to be occupied by someone reciting hate speech and scaring off other patrons (pun not intended, patron in the traditional sense) from other booths and from my business as a whole.
It is entirely possible, and in this day and age fairly easy, for those who got banned from Patreon to set up their own website hosted on their own servers in order to spread their message. I wouldn't say 'go to another platform' because the same thing would happen again. I would say 'make your own platform/website/blog'. You can set up agreements with Paypal or many other places to solicit funds. At this point, with Net Neutrality and ISPs not being able to ban you because they should be a public utility, you can not be removed from speaking how you wish. You can setup your own server easily to do this.
Caveats: net neutrality is an ideal in this scenario, since the FCC removed it. I am not 100% sure on payment providers, but I am sure there is a way to solicit funds without them in some way.
I'd add that I can't help being frightened by the psychology of someone eager to control other people's speech. It is a really toxic behavior in a liberal democracy.
I like to stand up on it and yell out my views. Sometimes I let my friends use it that way, too.
Some guy comes along and would like to use my soapbox to yell out his views. But I don't like him and I don't agree with his views.
Would you like the government to come force me at gunpoint to let him use my soapbox?
What you're arguing, basically, is that once my soapbox gets popular enough that lots of people want to use it, you do want the government to force me, at gunpoint, to let them use it even when I find their views repugnant.
Or, basically, what this person said, and they said it better and in fewer words:
> Would you like the government to come force me at gunpoint to let him use my soapbox?
That's easy, are you the only one with that soapbox? Do you own all the soapboxes? Are you a Corporation who is taking advantage of it's market dominance and near monopoly on modern free association to control public discourse?
So yes if your soapbox networks are now an integral part of public debate then the government should either regulate you or nationalize your assets for the public good. It's no different from why ISPs should be kept neutral, why power companys should be kept neutral and why public highways should be kept neutral.
The article avoids the specifics of what Benjamin said, which makes it hard to judge whether Patreon is acting reasonably. The interview in question is here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQ87Wf-0rZg.
Here are some excerpts from the automatically generated transcript (click the 3 dots, then "Open transcript"):
I just can't be bothered to deal
with people who treat me like this it's
really annoying like I you are acting
like a bunch of niggers just so you know
you you act like white niggers exactly
how you describe black people acting is
the impression I get dealing with y'all
don't expect me to them have a debate
with one of your faggots then why would
I bother bother you read like enough
class I don't know maybe you're just
acting like a nigga me have you
considered that do you think white
people act like this white people are
meant to be polite and respectful to one
another and you guys can't even act like
white people
it's about gaining attention and seems
like kikes are ruining everything
While one can reasonably to debate the whether Patreon should ban people based on ideology and off-site behavior, his comments do seem undeniably racist, anti-Semitic, and anti-homosexual.
He used slurs, that's for certain. But it's critical to point out that the context in which they were used was to tell the Alt Right that they're behaving exactly like they see the groups they despise (blacks, Jewish people, gays etc.) through their bigoted worldview. Not to mention, your excerpt cuts off a crucial part of what he said. As other commenters pointed out, the whole part of this was:
> It's not about, like, actually doing any good, it's about getting attention. And I see, like, 'kikes are ruining everything'. [laughs] Good—good—good job. Should tackle field [I can't understand this sentence]. You're making your movement look like you're not full of Nazis! Great! Bravo!"
In case the context isn't clear, saying that they "look like you're not full of Nazi" is sarcasm. Of course subscription to belief in a global Jewish conspiracy makes a group look like they're full of Nazis.
It is difficult to claim that these statements were meant as an attack on blacks and Jewish people themselves. It's pretty obvious that this banning was carried out for ideological reasons. In the past, Jack Conte stated that Patreon would only ban people for speech that was spread on their platform.[1] This was flat out ignored. It looks like much of their userbase is calling them out on the questionable justifications for the banning, too.[2]
Edit: changed "they're behaving exactly like the groups they despise" to "they're behaving exactly like they see the groups they despise through their bigoted worldview". Crucial mis-wording on my part, as the original version made it look I was saying said groups really do behave like how the alt-right claims.
> It is difficult to claim that these statements were meant as an attack on blacks and Jewish people themselves.
Looking through the rest of this thread, it doesn't appear to be difficult to claim that at all. Lots of people are doing so with ease. I think the issue is more about gaslighting vs honesty.
According to Carl Benjamin himself, the comments were meant ironically. He was reacting to a chat stream, which is missing context in that video, and the chat used slurs like this. So Benjamin used the slurs back at them.
Having said that, we have to assume Benjamin’s inner thoughts to know what he really meant, so I’m not arguing we should disregard it completely because of his alledged good intentions.
I don't think you should get to walk back your shitty comments by claiming you were just joking the whole time. Based on this guy's past behavior, I don't think anyone is giving him the benefit of the doubt here either.
Thanks for posting the actual content. Too often I think the actual content of the statements is left out of these things for political reasons (on both sides, depending on the context). I don't agree with all of Patreon's decisions on stuff like this, but this one seems reasonable, now that I can see the actual text.
This transcript shows Patreons malintent rather than alleviate our concerns with it, because they cut out essential context and in Matt Christiansens call with Patreon they admit the real cause was that they don't like his brand [1]. I challenge you to find racism and anti-semitic content on his channel.
Transcript: "exactly how you describe black people acting is the impression I get dealing with y'all", the last word should be "the alt-right".
Context: How is it not clear from reading this that he is saying that you act like a negative stereotype you've created? The alt-right Sargon is arguing against are (known for being) racist, anti-Semitic, and anti-homosexual. They used said slurs in the chat accompanying the livestream.
Transcript: "kikes are ruining everything"
Context: calling them out on acting like nazis - "And I see, like, 'kikes are ruining everything'. [laughs] Good—good—good job. Should tackle field [I can't understand this sentence]. You're making your movement look like you're not full of Nazis[clearly an ironic remark]! Great! Bravo!"
Context: him calling the alt-right out for turning on one of their own because he is married to a Jewish person - "It's just like how Mike Enoch was treated, when people found out his wife was Jewish. It's just like, he had to go dark, he had to go off the internet, because of the way these people treat him. It's like, holy shit, that's one of your own? Oh, he's married to a Jew, well, I guess, that's a bit of bad luck to be married before he was an alt-righter. Yes, he did, well, there we go. Kind of like 'Millenial was sucking a dick'. You know, it's like, it's crazy. You guys have no decorum. There's no level too low to go to."
Where the machine transcript says "exactly how you describe black people acting is the impression I get dealing with y'all", the last word should be "the alt-right". That is one piece of context: the people he's arguing against are (known for being) racist, anti-Semitic, and anti-homosexual.
Further, the "kikes are ruining everything" part seems to be a paraphrasing of the alt-right: "Go and bother, like, mic.com's comment section or something. You know, they are actually getting millions of views? The thing is, they just ignore you, which is why you don't, because you're just attention-seeking. It's not about, like, actually doing any good, it's about getting attention. And I see, like, 'kikes are ruining everything'. [laughs] Good—good—good job. Should tackle field [I can't understand this sentence]. You're making your movement look like you're not full of Nazis! Great! Bravo!"
Later: "It's just like how Mike Enoch was treated, when people found out his wife was Jewish. It's just like, he had to go dark, he had to go off the internet, because of the way these people treat him. It's like, holy shit, that's one of your own? Oh, he's married to a Jew, well, I guess, that's a bit of bad luck to be married before he was an alt-righter. Yes, he did, well, there we go. Kind of like 'Millenial was sucking a dick'. You know, it's like, it's crazy. You guys have no decorum. There's no level too low to go to."
It seems clear that at least the "anti-Semitic" aspect of his comments is, in fact, deniable.
If I was running a platform like Patreon I wouldnt moderate it.
I cant relate to leadership teams that do this, much less passionately do it with blog posts and explanations. It is arbitrary. Its within their right whether the specific cause is something I agree with or not. I can say that I wouldnt be interested.
A lot of times in these discussions folks like to abstract the actual instance that causes a controversy like this and instead change the conversation to rant about political correctness, centralization, and free speech.
If you wrote what this guy wrote in an email at your job you would be fired on the spot, it doesn't matter who you worked for or what industry. No one would be able to get away with this kind of speech on a public forum because it's so outside of societies agreed realm of discourse and deliberately involves language used to justify literal genocide.
Too often online the actual details of controversy are overlooked so folks can get all high minded about free speech. In all honesty it seems like a form of appeasement to me. Take a bit here, take a bit there, and eventually you end up with a gunman shooting up a synagogue and a woman being run over at a white nationalist rally.
This article is poorly researched and misses the key points of the dispute.
Patreon previously said that they only care about content on their platform. Sargon's comments weren't on Patreon. They weren't on his Youtube channel, which is presumably what Patreon money is supporting. They were made during an interview with an altogether different channel.
So the rules were changed retroactively without warning.
Next, the scary part involves another company called Subscribe Star.
After the ban was announced, a number of creators decided they didn't want to put all their eggs in one basket and opened up accounts on Subscribe Star.
Several hours later PayPal cut service to Subscribe Star without explanation.
Jaqueline Hart, who made the decision to ban Sargon, used to work at PayPal.
It certainly looks like she called in a favour to kill a competing service.
>"This month, the site’s moderators received a complaint about Mr. Benjamin, who had risen to fame railing against diversity and feminism during the GamerGate movement in 2014. Mr. Benjamin used the N-word and anti-gay language during an interview posted to YouTube on Feb. 7, Patreon found."
I could be wrong, but I'm under the impression Benjamin used that word to insult white supremacists, whom he evidently does not count himself among. It wasn't very smart of him to think everybody would be okay with it just because he chose the 'right' target.
It's... pretty vitriolic. I'm not totally comfortable with even quoting the redacted version, but here goes nothing:
>“I just can’t be bothered with people who chose to treat me like this. It’s really annoying. Like, I — . You’re acting like a bunch of n_____s, just so you know. You act like white n_____s. Exactly how you describe black people acting is the impression I get dealing with the Alt Right. I’m really, I’m just not in the mood to deal with this kind of disrespect.”
>“Look, you carry on, but don’t expect me to then have a debate with one of your f__gots.…Like why would I bother?…Maybe you’re just acting like a n____r, mate? Have you considered that? Do you think white people act like this? White people are meant to be polite and respectful to one another, and you guys can’t even act like white people, it’s really amazing to me.”
I don't agree with his choice of words, and I think its kinda weird that he chose to express himself the way he did when there was a much easier way to go about making the same remark, but that said, it's simply amoral to try and cutoff someone's living and censor them just because the way they said something wasn't to your liking (to be clear I'm not talking about you in particular, but just people in general who think what patreon did was ok).
I don't really care about his choice of words, it's the hateful intent behind them that makes his views wrongthink for me. It's possible to use the n-word in a way that makes me think Patreon is overreacting but reading the context he's definitely beyond the pale in a way that goes far past verbiage.
Our descendants are going to be seriously confused by our practice of limiting or taking away people's ability to earn money because they publicly used a wrong word. Or so I hope, at least.
The right to free speech protects you from being persecuted by the government. Patreon and any other private company reserve the right to choose their customers (and workers) based on what they say. This has always been the case. There are countless examples, even in the past, where companies have fired employees for saying things they shouldn't have.
The English language is pretty large. There are a good number of alternatives to using the word he did that would be safe. He didn't have to use that word, but either did because he uses it often and is comfortable with it, or purposefully thought it would be a good use there. Both of which are questionable.
I'd also argue that Patreon isn't obligated at all to help him earn money here. It's not a employee employer relationship here, and they can choose to not to continue to help a person that they deem harmful to other customers.
I don’t think they will be. It’s pretty easy to parse: these users don’t own Patreon; therefore, users whose speech they disagree with are not entitled to their services. This is honestly pretty well established. Patreon does not owe anyone a platform.
Maybe not. We might be shocked that people in Europe in the past got tortured or executed for heresy and apostasy, but we're not really confused by it: if your words undermine the creeds that hold up the power structure, you are punished. It's not complicated.
Our ancestors took away people's ability to earn a living, and sometimes much more than that, because of their ethnicity or sexual orientation. People can control what opinions they voice in public. No one is forced to make racist statements. I see nothing wrong with punishing people for their choices when those choices bring harm to others.
Misreported here is what more reasonable creators objected to:
- Account shutdown without notice
- Lack of appeals process until publicity and a wave of de-subscribes hit the platform
- Reversal of Conte's promise to only police content directly supported by patrons
- Surprise morality stance and language, "reforming" and requiring a "full-throated apology"
While one cannot condone Benjamin's behavior, Patreon is not being honest about its mercurial behavior, shifting policies, and repositioning as a scold. So creators who ethically address controversial topics (i.e. not Benjamin) become nervous.
I love what Patreon does for creators. But this deeply disturbs me.
If you've branded yourself as being politically incorrect, isn't this the kind of conflict and publicity you strive to achieve?
I'm getting a little tired of people who've made a career saying what you "can't say on TV" and then pretending to be surprised when their content gets pulled.
If you've branded yourself as being politically incorrect, isn't this the kind of conflict and publicity you strive to achieve?
I'm getting a little tired of people who've made a career saying what you "can't say on TV" and then pretending to be surprised when their content gets pulled.
Wait - how do you know what people's intentions are?
Your entire comment is premised on the idea that 'people who've made a career' - as in "all of em" since you said "people who
."- are in fact trolls who deserve what they get. First you know their secret intentions (making a career out of it) and second you deem them unworthy of having their content even remotely worth thinking about preserving before being pulled. You're tired, after all.
Please don't end up in a position of power, kind sir/ma'am.
He's quoted in the article as saying his brand is politically incorrect. Its a calculated decision to add shock to his act. This conflict is not something he's trying to avoid to get his ideas out there. Its painfully clear.
The content itself is irrelevant to my point as it is a general statement about adding shock value to any act and the faux-consequences of it.
He has labeled himself as such. My comment is clearly about self proclaimed shock jocks looking for controvercy and then complaining as if that wasn't the point to begin with.
This is such a biased article. The most important fact is purposefully omitted. This article makes it seem like Sargon purposefully used those racist statements in a racist context. He was using it as an analogy and against the alt-right. Lying by omission makes this entire article completely bogus. I hate when the fringe media does this in literally every article and I really hate it when the best papers do it and the NYtimes is unfortunately the best paper we have in my opinion. I would pull my subscription over something like this 5 years ago but now days everyone does this.
Readit News
On the one hand, Patreon shouldn't have to do business with people they don't like. On the other hand, at what point do we accept that we have different viewpoints and live and let live?
The biggest one for me in recent history was Cloudflare arbitrarily deciding to stop hosting the Daily Stormer. Sure, DS is vile, but at the point we start enforcing censorship on a whim instead of hardened policies that aren't selectively enforced, I think it becomes worrisome.
I guess I don't have a problem with people deciding what messages they do and do not want to support, as much as I have a larger problem with the rest of the world handing them the reigns.
Centralization is the real evil, here. Why are we giving companies and people the right to silence vast amounts of voices and opinions on random whims?
Then you see counter-arguments, like "well if you don't want to get banned, don't say bad things!" But then, who decides what's bad? The societal norms are shifting to a place where there are certain topics that are not allowed to be discussed at all even if looking at them from a critical lens. So, there are problems that people have, and things that need to be talked about, but they aren't allowed to say anything about it. They can only reference the idea from some distant euphemism.
The ones that do use their voices are banished to the shadows where, not only do they not stop thinking and saying what they were before, but now they dig their heels in further. They spread out to forums that will have them, and incidentally tend to allow hate speech or inciting violence. So we're taking the ideas we do not find palatable and sending them off to a distant land where the other bad ideas go to twist and tear and fester and rot.
To me, personally and anecdotally, this seems to be happening with increasing velocity. We're tightening our grip on what speech is acceptable and using centralized services to force this control on ourselves, over a platform that has always been about the open exchange of ideas.
So what do we do? I don't know. Privately-owned services should be free to censor. People should also continue to speak freely (if legal). I certainly think Net Neutrality is essential at this point, whether enforced via public infrastructure or some kind of over-arching regulation. But, there's not much anyone can do in the current framework of things other than encourage decentralization. And I do, when I can.
Also, for the record, I'm a feminist, left-leaning socialist. So good luck writing me off as another conservative windbag who doesn't understand the first amendment that's crowing about censorship. I think censorship is a problem, whether it's via private platforms or not.
The government, soapboxes, homes and places of business that are happy to have them.
Freedom of Speech is not the right to be heard. If people don't like what you have to say, or how you are saying it, they are free to walk away. If you don't like what someone is doing in your place of business, you can also throw them out. That includes being allowed to throw a loud ranting racist out of a, say, pub or a website.
These individuals are free to create their own businesses and websites which facilitate whatever kind of discourse they please, nobody can take that away from them (unless they venture into fighting words). They, however, seem to want to be where their ideas are not wanted[1].
Patreon would likely be happy to have a conservative on their website if the primary concern of the content was not intolerance.
> I'm torn about this.
Karl Popper helps clear it up[2]. His wording surrounding FoS is particularly illuminating because it doesn't specifically calling out left-extremists or right-extremists; both have been pretty awful about attacking speech, especially the escalation over the past few years.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vote_brigading [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
People keep saying this and repeating it, but as far as I can tell this meme is destructive and wrong. Freedom of speech isn't just a legal assurance that congress shall make no law abridging it. It is also a set of cultural norms rooted deeply in a long lineage of hard won ideas. It is Evelyn Hall's principle "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it". It is Friedrich Nietzsche's dictum that only insecure societies are threatened by quirky characters with weird ideas. It is our own Daniel Gackle's observation that tolerance is the experience of suffering through unpleasant ideas. We endure that suffering because the world is dramatically better on balance when we do.
Popper and the paradox of tolerance have nothing to do with it because we aren't talking about fascists angling to march on Washington DC to burn down the Library of Congress. We're talking about people who may have made a careless remark, or have quirky ideas, or disagree with the overall bent of the arc of history.
By banning these people platforms like Twitter and Patreon are eroding free speech not in the legal sense, but in the cultural norms sense. If these norms continue getting eroded, god help us all -- it may set humanity and the western civilization back by hundreds of years.
That's technically correct, but it doesn't get at the core of the concept. If you read the original arguments in favor of freedom of speech, you'll see they don't focus on the rights of the speaker as much as the rights of the listener. John Milton, Thomas Paine, and John Stuart Mill all made the point (in various ways) that every time you stop someone from saying or publishing an idea, you are also preventing others who want to hear or read that idea from doing so. In addition, censorship requires delegating a censor. Effectively, that means you are letting someone else decide what you're allowed to read and hear. I don't know about everyone else, but there is no government body or private company that I trust with that power. Disclaimers, warnings, and age verification steps are fine, but memory-holing ideas? No thank you.
In the case of Patreon, there is a man who people want to give money to. He wants to accept that money. There is no criminal activity on either side of the transaction. Yet Patreon is preventing these people from doing what they want because Patreon dislikes one paragraph of the man's boorish utterances. This is in direct contradiction to their stated policy (where the person has to endanger the safety of others) and there's a suspicious amount of partisan bias in the application of these policies.
Patreon isn't the first company to behave this way, just the most recent. These actions increase political polarization, erode public trust in institutions and companies, and confirm the persecution complexes of many on the ends of the political spectrum. I'm sure the people in charge of these platforms feel like they're doing the right thing, but I think they are mistaken.
Sure, I guess you could say Patreon has the right to ban people from its service. But people have found its not easy or practical to compete with them. They've found everyone from their domain registrar to their website host to their payment processor refusing to do business with them.
And at some point, that means it becomes virtually impossible to express yourself if your views are unpopular enough. No one wants to be a service or common carrier, everyone buckles under controversy when it occurs. Should some views only be expressable by millionaires or people with enough resources not to need services from anyone? It's not legal censorship, but it's de facto censorship none the less.
As the likes of SubscribeStar found out, offering a 'free speech' alternative to Patreon is now virtually impossible because of it.
https://www.ft.com/content/7c4285b2-fe2f-11e8-ac00-57a2a8264...
Your argument 'not the right to be heard' does not apply in the context of shutting down users with controversial ideas on sites like Patreon and Reddit because visitors have ample space to not seek out the quiet 'ranting racist'. I have yet to experience people being thrown out of a bar, restaurant, or business because their conversation included racist or controversial topics.
Although we all agree that this is legal to do (and nobody is thinking about taking Patreon to court), there is a second, more subtle social issue at play. Taking it to the extreme, if you live in a company town earning company scrip to spend at the company store, when the company decides that they don't like what you're doing in their place of business (organizing a union, perhaps), getting kicked out is functionally identical to a governmental sanction. As a result, even though the law permits companies to engage in heavy-handed social hedge-trimming, in some cases it can have the same problems as the government censorship that we have already agreed is bad. It would be going too far to say that corporations have an inalienable moral right to police whatever they control.
That is, we want businesses to have the right to choose who to do business with, unless we disagree with their reasons for not wanting to do business with someone.
Reminds me a little of the whole Parental Advisory thing with rock music or Spotify's decisions around violent artists. How outraged should we be that artists that say very questionable things are on Spotify and Youtube? Should songs about murder, rape or glorifying breaking the law be allowed on those platforms? Or where should the companies draw the line?
That's very clearly not true at all. Just a dozen or so major companies or orgs can work together to shut you out of having nearly any reach at all. For practical purposes, you'll have zero reach. Any combined small group of them can easily be enough to make your life online dramatically more difficult.
They can get you at the domain registration (oligopoly + mixture of cartel behavior). Oh, well, you have no right to a domain registration.
They can get you at the ISP level (oligopoly). Oh, well, you have no right to Internet access.
They can get you at the discovery level. Oh, well, Google (monopoly), Facebook (monopoly), Twitter, Reddit, et al. don't owe you any discovery access.
They can get you at the hosting level. Oh, well, nobody owes you access to any sort of hosting, from Azure or AWS to Wordpress or Tumblr.
They can get you at the network transit level. If just a few ISPs or large backbone operators in the US blacklist your site from their customers, few will be able to see you. Again for practical purposes, you're dead in that market.
Google as one example has openly bragged about their potential to conspire with other malevolent entities to tightly control expression/speech. They know their position and exactly how they can abuse it to their political or ideological bias.
In the age of inherently subjective 'hate speech' as The Devil that must be stopped at any and all costs, none of this is far fetched in the least. It's going to get a lot worse yet; the topics covered by 'hate speech' blockades will get far more extensive in the coming years. The enemies of free speech have been wildly emboldened by their successes and the lack of push-back. The entire West is going to end up with the equivalent of a less restrictive Chinese firewall, and that's where liberal Democracy is guaranteed to die.
This made a lot of sense when I was a kid. Since that time, communication has become incredibly centralized - whether it’s the platform (eg, YT), or the infrastructure to keep it running (eg, Cloudflare.)
Today, if one or two private enterprises decide they want to eliminate your voice, you’re effectively barred from the public square. You can’t roll your own cloud flare.
When private resources so entirely consume our public interactions, the old stand-by of “well, private companies can do what they want...” seems to engage in a form of category error. It may be a private organization, but it’s dominating a public good.
Plenty of times throughout history, oligopolists and monopolists have been forced to follow common-carriage rules, whether by actual regulation or the threat thereof.
Also, you are conflating the First Amendment, a legal instrument, with the ideas of freedom of speech and open discourse. The First Amendment bars the government from itself censoring people. It does not say that the government cannot require non-discrimination on the part of private companies.
I partially agree. Freedom of speech isn't the right to be heard by those who don't want to hear you, but it most certainly is the right to be heard by those who do want to hear you.
To put it another way: Alice wants to say something. Bob wants to hear what Alice has to say. Cedric, a would-be censor, wants to prevent Alice getting her message out to Bob. Censorship is whenever Cedric wins, and freedom of speech is whenever Cedric fails.
Excellent intellectual ammunition.
This is not just about free speech and freedom of association. It's about anti-competitive practices in the marketplaces. People who have done what you suggest discover a coordinated effort to de-platform which includes things like making it impossible to use theoretically neutral infrastructure, like CAs or DNS or routing or payment systems or monetization. Meanwhile "approved" competitors see no such bar. In the United States this is conspiracy to restrain trade. When a person can only make a living if the platforms approve of the content, the platform is picking winners and losers in the market. These are outrageously unfair business practices.
These platforms are supposed to do two things:
- blog/media hosting, both storage and web distribution
- Handling regulatory and coding requirements for accepting payments, via a trustworthy single payee... so that subscribers aren't having to provide credit card numbers to every random content creator out there
These platforms are violating expectations by going beyond solving those problems and trying to be a nanny. We don't need nannies on the internet.
They aren't even doing a good job of being a neutral nanny. On patreon, there is a ton of objectionable content depending on your point of view and morality. (On youtube, there is a ton of garbage content, though not much adult/erotic material because it's mostly banned.) If either platform cared about the perception of their platforms being a place for content appropriate for a formal dinner party, they wouldn't operate as they do now.
In the case of Patreon, if someone doesn't like a patreon creator's content, they don't have to subscribe to it. Patreon content is discoverable, but it's not self-promoted by Patreon, so people aren't generally going to see much that they find objectionable. For platforms like youtube, which use subscriptions/histories to recommend other videos unsolicited, there needs to be a better tagging system so visitors can blacklist tags that will trigger them. Other than that, these platforms are not, and should not pretend to be, in the nanny business. And everyone needs to have a thick enough skin that they can encounter a summary, title, or first few seconds of a video they find offensive and simply laugh it off as internet idiots being idiots, and navigate elsewhere rather than pretending they have moral justification to complain to platforms about content that is neither violence-promoting nor defamatory.
[1] https://www.patreon.com/intlantifadefence
[2] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/antifa-dom...
[3] https://www.patreon.com/chapotraphouse
[4] https://www.reddit.com/r/ChapoTrapHouse/comments/9k14nf/why_...
[5] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_violence
How do you defend them employing someone that is a public supporter of the domestic terrorist organization antifa?
[6] http://www.returnofkings.com/125075/patreon-employee-aaron-r...
Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.
But if say ISPs start blocking non-beige content, then freedom of speech is dead. Shouldn't there be a minimum internet infrastructure where people can say whatever they want? Aren't CDNs part of that infrastructure?
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.
Yes, but it's funny that we're now deliberating conflating 'people' with 'private corporations', a conflation that folks on the left vociferously condemned when it came to Citizens United.
I think we should look at ourselves a bit more carefully in the mirror - are private corporations supposed to be held to a higher standard or not? Especially when they have de facto monopolistic control over platforms that everyone uses.
For example, it's all very well to say that Google is a private corporation free to censor you if it wishes, until you're a content creator that is de facto knocked off the air because of Content ID, without any of the due process that copyright law actually demands.
Put in another context, should we get rid of net neutrality because Comcast ought to have the right to decide what content goes over its pipes?
What is it then?
PS I have to add that the "loudness" of some point of view in the social media is the willingness of people to hear or see that point of view.
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Yeah.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18750037
> They, however, seem to want to be where their ideas are not wanted[1].
How are mobs following people they don't like around, seeking to destroy their livelihoods not much worse than "vote brigading"?
And on what planet aren't those mobs using vote brigading on top of that?
Then this limited "freedom of speech", a provincial americanism based on a historical accident (the first amendment), is not the full freedom of speech the philosophers of enlightenment, artists, activists, etc., described.
>If people don't like what you have to say, or how you are saying it, they are free to walk away
In this case, they weren't free to walk away, they were thrown out, regardless of whether what was said was popular or not.
If we allow those with internet platforms to decide what's ok to be written, we're regressing before the enlightenment.
It doesn't matter if someone can "create their own platform". A right to free speech should include the ability to talk in the popular platforms of the day, the "marketplace of ideas". Nobody should be guaranteed an audience, but nobody should be denied a place to speak and potentially gather one.
(Of course big private interests have all the space they want in their own owned platforms, from TV channels and websites, to press and social media -- for them there's no "make your own website to spew your shit", they already have all of them -- and they get to pick who gets to participate in them).
Also note that just because the wind today is pro-progressive, and people you like (like the Patreon guy) get to dictate who says what and what's not to be said on their properties, it doesn't mean it will always be this way. The liberal twenties in Germany were followed by Nazism. The 60's and early 70's in the US were followed by Reagan. Consider freedom of speech practices that should apply now and later, when progressives don't have the same clout.
It's very difficult to imagine Bell Telephone (in their 100% monopoly days I mean) feeling responsible for what people discuss on their wires, or feeling a need to deny (say) pornographers service so that its other customers wouldn't feel tainted. Or Visa likewise today -- it's understood that other people will use the same plastic to pay for things you morally disapprove of, just as they could use cash. But it's positioned as a neutral carrier, and nobody cares (I think).
Regarding Visa being neutral, I think there are cases where this is actually not true: https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2018/08/23/david-horowitz-vis.... Obviously, excuse the source, but I believe the core idea is still fact.
So, censorship is being exercised in areas even where you'd expect neutral carriers. I would call that worrying.
Heh, well I hope so. But that recent NYTimes story[0] about how mass shootings used guns and ammo bought with a credit card makes me unsure about that. I'd have thought using cash vs credit was more or less interchangeable, and either the person should be allowed to buy the firearms or not. But given the focus on how it was bought, makes me think there's some movement towards expecting Visa and the like to not be simply neutral facilitators of transactions.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/12/24/business/deal...
It will be really interesting to see if 2019 brings a change in the outrage that is currently directed at public facing platforms over their content policies to the actual architects of many of those decisions, which are Visa/MC and a handful of advertising brokers.
We can argue about the role of individual platforms, but Visa/MC in particular have a cast iron, long term monopoly with much stronger effects on the public than any national government does. Their editorial policies should be under huge public scrutiny.
This is how oppression operates. First it's, "Well, we'd live and let live, but we can't afford the consequences if we serve you." Then it will be, "We can't afford the consequences if we're at all associated with you." Then it will be, "We can't afford the consequences if we don't loudly support the 'right' things." Finally, it will become, "We can't afford the consequences if we don't turn you in."
Bell in its monopoly days was a common carrier [0], regulated by law to treat all phone lines equally.
> Or Visa likewise today -- it's understood that other people will use the same plastic to pay for things you morally disapprove of, just as they could use cash. But it's positioned as a neutral carrier, and nobody cares (I think).
Visa and Mastercard are not common carriers - they can and do discriminate.
One of the weirdest ironies in this debate is that the people Patreon is ending business relationships with tend to be libertarian/conservative types who are generally skeptical of government regulation of business. And yet what they really seem to want is regulation of Patreon, Twitter [1], Cloudflare [2], etc as common carriers.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_carrier
1: https://qz.com/1381708/twitter-finally-banned-alt-right-cons...
2: https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/
There has always been a realm of discourse that society agrees upon and that we use to set the boundaries of conversation, just a few decades ago anti-Semitism and racism were allowed and now it isn't, overall this is a good thing.
There are more platforms than ever available to you if you want to express your fringe ideas, each of the platforms has the right to ban you if it goes against what they stand for. Everyone who uses the platforms understands the risks, I don't understand where all this pearl clutching is coming from.
But there aren't. It's an illusion of diversity.
They're all owned or being bought up by the same centralized handful of outfits-turned-conglomerates that have always controlled the means of distribution. Haven't you noticed the flurry of mergers (successful or not) in the last 10-15 years?
If you want to talk about a "marketplace of ideas," this is just an example of how it works in practice. Alex Jones or users of /r/FatPeopleHate etc. are 100% legally allowed to spread their ideas in most countries and therefore still participate in this "marketplace". However, consumers themselves find certain actions and ideas repulsive and last year's young and vulnerable males have perhaps grown up a little, so websites are trying to read the market and get ahead of the curve before a smart competitor can pick up those consumers by advertising "we don't allow content like that on this platform, but you can find it on Patreon if you really want."
If the concerns about Patreon's censorship that we're seeing in this thread were really as valid as their prevalence should indicate then Reddit banning subs like /r/FatPeopleHate and /r/CoonTown might have led to Reddit's downfall a long time ago (like how very many redditors predicted), and Voat.co would be a flowering bastion of ideas and content from people drawn to its promise of unadulterated free speech. Instead Voat is a second-rate, hostile finge community while Reddit is only gaining prominence as a website. That doesn't seem to be changing anytime soon.
The same thing would happen to any "alternative" Patreon, so for very many powerful members of this "anti-feminist"/"new right"/"Intellectual Dark Web" I think they might see this as writing on the wall for them and their entire movement. Maybe what they're afraid of in the long run is that their ideas simply don't stand up to scrutiny and without access to a sufficiently large mainstream community where the law of averages would budget them a steady stream of converts they would steadily lose members and just fizzle out on some forgotten corner of the internet.
When society gets to a point that it decides internet access is a basic necessity, and not a luxury that can be shut off by a company when a random middle manager decides.
To use your example, DS is a terrible thing. But its electric provider will never shut off its juice for being too controversial.
Its water will not be cut off because of its views.
Its heating oil fuel will keep being delivered, because the oil distributor hasn't decided to impose its leaders' morals on others, and punish those it disagrees with by withholding its service.
As long as the internet is "optional," then the vast majority and chattering masses won't complain about a small group of people cutting off smaller groups of people.
I can't wrap my brain around the notion of the water company shutting off an extremist group's taps.
There are different modes: I do not have to give someone I strongly dislike the freedom to preach at my home. However, if I have a media content distribution business, and allow creators freedom to create their own message I should also tolerate content that I personally dislike; otherwise I risk my business to morph from content distribution into society manipulation. "I disapprove of what you say, but will defend your right to say it". Patreon is wrong. My 2c.
They want you to treat them at equal in the world of debate because that's how their views are legitimized and given power. I find it honestly disturbing that people are more willing to defend the 'ironic' people calling for the death of their enemies than the minorities trying to get them to stop.
Those who argue in bad faith will spread viral speech resistant to good faith counterarguments. To assume that these people are just missing the correct information is to assume that we are dealing with purely rational minds. No amount of reasoning will change a bad-faith argument.
I think a lot of the discussion about free speech values need to consider the context of our changing world. The rhetorical battlefield of the modern world is no longer as we know it. Perhaps it made more sense in the past to simply fight ideas with ideas, since schools of thought were more centralized and ideas spread slowly, getting filtered and curated along the way. Today, there is instantaneous spreading of ideas to every corner of the world. The things people hear about are not the best ideas, but rather the most transmittable ideas. Our society has spent billions of dollars cultivating the mind virus industry, and they have discovered very powerful techniques for spreading dangerous pathogens. Facts alone do not cure a mind infected with emotionally-rooted lies. We need stronger immune systems.
And while education is indeed one part of the picture, having more opportunities for empathy and having stronger cultural standards are another. Restricting this kind of speech sets the standard that some ideas are not compatible with a modern society. However, I agree that this method is flawed: it creates the perception of persecution and martyrdom, and uncomfortably concentrates power. I think modern progressive thinking needs to focus more on a sort of empathetic education rather than going all in on an antagonistic shaming approach.
This "marketplace of ideas" and the idea that fascism can be argued away is demonstrably not working. Trying to engage a True Believer in debate simply lets them use the exposure to spread their ideology, they and their adherents simply feed on the controversy.
That's why a large segment of the alt-right run around daring people to "debate" them, because they know all exposure is good exposure, when it comes to the segment they're targeting.
By debating fascists, you implicitly give credence to the notion that their ideology is valid and worthy of civil discourse, when it is in fact the direct opposite of free speech and freedom for all.
"I disapprove of what you say but will do my level best to ensure it's profitable for you and your copycats to keep saying it in a more and more attention-seekingly extreme manner" sounds suspiciously like the net result is society manipulation of a different sort. Ultimately I think private organizations have a right to have the time, effort and money they invest in growing their platform's reach decoupled from the change in the public profile of evil.
Patreon want to prevent the expression of certain thoughts. For example, they are against "negative generalizations, of people based on their race". However, negative generalisations are sometimes true. For example the homicide rate in Japan is much lower than in Jamaica; from this it follows that Jamaicans are on average more homicidal than Japanese. That's a negative generalisation. It's also true.
I wouldn't mind that Patreon are censorious, if there were lots of alternatives. But that brings me to your other point:
> Centralization is the real evil, here.
This is the real problem, plus the fact that internet-based services tend to become centralised, due to network effects, high fixed costs and low variable costs.
I'm not sure what the solution is. Encouraging decentralisation seems to me a bit like trying to make water run uphill: you can do it, but it's an effort and as soon as you stop, the water just runs back downhill.
Good luck with that. The Visa MasterCard cartel will not allow a Patreon competitor with different standards to use their payment infrastructure and will use their connections to get any competitor kicked off of other payment processors.
It’s been two weeks and SubscribeStar still don’t have a replacement for the eight payment processors that dropped them all at once after they took on Carl Benjamin.
Patreon would have backed down by now if that was an option.
It’s all about the payment processors, as you’ll figure out pretty quickly if you read this transcript of a call between the head of Patreon’s Censorship team and one of their creators.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1U0mQjUA0T5INc_GDkwPJ2mfh...
To me, a generalization is where you infer that because a general fact exists (e.g. the homicide rate) there is consequently a more specific fact about each member of a group. I feel like you have stopped short of actually making a generalization, or are leaving it ambiguous as to whether you have made one. If the homicide rate implies something about each Jamaican, what does it imply? I find the equivocation over such matters more viscerally irritating than the racism itself.
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That is not true. The fact you presented might be true, but the statement that "Jamaicans are on average more homicidal than Japanese" is not identical to the fact about homicide rates.
Your statement implies that those two groups of people are somehow differing in temperament such that one has more violent tendencies than the other.
The reality is that there are many complicating factors, and your statement removes enough of those that it no longer is true.
For example, a similar but more obviously false statement from the same vein: "It is a fact that americans have more total car accidents than the ancient greeks. Therefore, the americans are worse drivers than the ancient greeks" (or similarly "more americans own cars and have no accidents than ancient greeks, so it follows americans are better drivers). The obvious confounding factor there is the fact that ancient greece had no cars, but it follows an identical pattern to your statement. It starts with a simple fact, and then creates a phrase which neatly avoids all confounding factors and has a negative implication that relates to the fact, but ignores how complex reality is.
I think that if you, in seriousness, made a statement like your example, you can and should be banned from platforms. You're mis-using facts to represent one culture as more violent than another, and implying that it's a trait of the people, not a much more complicated result of economic and legal differences. It's an incredibly racist and insidious thing to say.
In fairness, that was actually DS's fault. They went and said "everyone else has banned us, but cloudflare hasn't. Cloudflare agree with what we stand for".
Cloudflares CEO responded by saying "It would be an objectivly bad thing for the world if I used my position as CEO of cloudflare to censor information and opinions. However, if DS's public standpoint is that if I'm not against them I must be with them, then I'm /definitely/ against them".
I think that's reasonable enough, it's pretty cheeky for DS to attempt to usurp cloudflares good name, and totally appropriate for cloudflare to push them under a bus as a response.
>So what do we do? I don't know. Privately-owned services should be free to censor. People should also continue to speak freely (if legal).
I wrote a long version of an answer to this, but it started to ramble a lot. Short version: once someone has 50% of the planet as a customer base, as facebook does, they're not a private company any more, they're a public utility. Even with a much smaller userbase, a company could be acting like a public utility in some countries. We should drop regulation and auditing on them like a tonne of bricks, same as we do other de-facto monopolies like the tax department. If companies don't want that, they should work to generate a marketplace of options for customers.
Thanks, that's a really interesting take on the problem, and I tend to agree. It seems that once something becomes infrastructure (however that would be defined...either by your 50% rule or something more nuanced) it becomes heavily regulated, or at least governed by the principals of net neutrality.
> the world handing them the reigns.
Nobody is handing anyone the reigns. Patreon didn't even exist a few years ago, and now we're debating whether or not free speech is in peril because someone was banned from it. It's the same thing with people who get incensed over twitter bans... who cares? These are just arbitrary business... these things just don't really matter.
Agreed.
And the govt (US and EU) can break them up whenever they they attain market monopoly. Or governments (every other one) can decide they've had enough with arbitrary content control by foreigners and ban their service within their borders.
Which is fine, really. I dont b%^h about FB and friends kicking someone out of their service. I expect the enlightened not to b^&h when countries ban services they like.
The Internet as we knew it in the 90s is dead. Time to get over it.
Having more foundational internet infrastructure and services controlled by the government (which IS bound by freedom of speech rules) would also solve this issue.
But the ironic thing here, is that most of the right-leaning people complaining about being kicked off platforms, would oppose doing this.
They also oppose private platforms being told how to behave by the government, as it happens, they're just complaining in this particular case because here that works against them.
I personally "feel" (because I can't really form a hardened ideology around it) that the closer things get to infrastructure, the more neutral they should be. In other words, the more difficult it is to spin up a competitor to Company A, the more Company A should actively work to not censor or shape messages or ideas.
I also agree we cannot enforce decentralization. My hope is that one day, we can see the benefits of it as a people and collectively decide to go that route without coercion of any kind. Wishful thinking, probably =]. That won't stop me from trying to convince others of the benefits, though.
This is the crux of it. I have a very low opinion of all these people, "anti-feminists" and whatever else, but this sort of drama does illustrate that we have a problem with just a few entities being in a position to stifle the speech of a large number of people. It doesn't seem great, regardless of whether some of its present manifestations appear to be good.
On the flip side, these marginal voices never really had an effective mouthpiece in the past, so maybe the net effect is not significant. But I worry that we will miss opportunities for unique individual expression that the internet, in theory, could provide.
Strange how I never see this argument for allowing people to yell fire in a crowded theater. Perhaps because the people who make these arguments are likely to be harmed in the theater but not by the violent racists. Would they be willing to defend platforming anti-Christian rhetoric in Bangladesh while living there?
Societal rules like "free speech" are not black and white. They are muddy distillations of enlightened self-interest, where each person tries to impose rules on others to reduce their own chances of being harmed. Thus, the European states and the USA all have laws against murder but draw their lines on protected speech differently based on what makes sense in their societies.
The only reason Americans find this so hard to understand is that they are drilled with hero worship for the nation's founders from Kindergarten, much like a North Korean child will be trained to deify the Kim family. The reality is that the documents these men produced were compromises suited to their time, and electoral colleges and 3/5 compromises are not timeless truths for governing.
Why are those different hands? I can accept that you have a different viewpoint, and that you should be free to express it and people should be free to do business with you, without myself choosing to do business with you. That is, accepting Patreon’s action here is a model of accepting different viewpoints with a live-and-let-live attitude, not an opposed alternative to it.
> To me, personally and anecdotally, this seems to be happening with increasing velocity.
It's not, it's just now sometimes biting the right-wing ideologies that historically have for decades directed private and public censorship in every institution of American life (and whose values are still codified in many systems of private and public censorship), so it actually stands out from the expected background more.
That's a very strawman-ish way to discuss matters. I won't deny that a few people think that way, but it is neither the only, nor the strongest counter-argument.
What they absolutely ought not do - and what Patreon might perhaps be held contractually responsible for, here - is to hide the ball and not be transparent about their reasons for removing people.
This recurring theme is now showing up on a regular basis in social media - opaque rules of morality that you have to guess at and appear to be enacted at the platform's whim. If there are groups they don't want on board, they should say so. I suspect they don't because they fear the fragmentation and competition that laying those rules down would encourage.
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Patreon dishonestly tried to retroactively apply an amended TOS to justify banning him, after the fact.
This demonstrates that Patreon is a dishonest company that will ban you because they feel like it, and then also try to take the high ground and pretend that they are just following their own rules and or trying to keep people safe, when both of those are not true.
And the NYTimes calling Benjamin's awkward and poorly chosen words "hate speech" is frankly libelous. However, even if they were hate speech, Patreon specifically allows so-called "hate speech", as long as it is not on their site.
As long as people and corporations are motivated solely by profit, you will see this move to "truth in the middle" milquetoast centrist presentation, in order to not offend the advertisers and shareholders.
The people who run the platform?
I appreciate free speech, it allows me to read/hear opposing viewpoints so I can reevaluate what I currently believe so I can make sure I still have confidence in my chosen belief systems.
This is why I will make the time to talk to people of faith different than mine, as well as why I pay attention to news/conversations from other countries, as well as differing political parties in my own country (USA).
I enjoy critical thinking, and it can only be done thoroughly with ample sources of data.
Transcript of a call from Patreon’s Censorship department and a creator. It doesn’t take much reading between the lines to know it’s payment processors.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1U0mQjUA0T5INc_GDkwPJ2mfh...
I've been banned from or chosen to leave multiple platforms. The crux of the issue: I have an incurable medical condition that I manage with diet and lifestyle. I've gotten off all the drugs I'm supposed to be on.
I get viciously attacked by others. When I complained to the mods on other platforms (not HN), I have been told their ugly attacks, in clear violation of the rules, are fine and I'm the problem.
I've been told I'm crazy. I've been told I have Munchausen, never mind that Munchausen involves faking illness for attention and my claim is I'm getting healthier. I've had people maliciously suggest that my son, who has the same diagnosis I have, is a product of incest.
I mean, this is ugly stuff. There's zero justification for some of the things that have been said to me.
I've worked hard at trying to figure out how to tread lightly, be very polite and respectful, etc. But, when all is said and done, the unforgivable offense appears to be that I'm a dirt-poor former homemaker who spent several years homeless who claims to have solved a problem that doctors and scientists can't figure out.
So, basically, speaking the truth about my life makes me persona non grata. I can find no way forward for what's an acceptable way to try to talk to people about any of this. Even without trying to promote solutions or make money from it, simply trying to talk to people in public forums about this stuff is essentially a bannable offense in many places.
I've spent years trying to not end up like Semmelweis:* committed to an asylum and dead because of it for trying to say "Hey, world, I think I know something medically useful."
I don't know what the solution is. But every time I see an article about someone being banned from a platform and saying they really don't have other options and this is a threat to their livelihood, etc, I'm extremely sympathetic. I was homeless for years and asking how I can make money online and essentially being told by a lot of people to STFU and GTFO, people who like to see themselves as good and kind and generous and making the world a better place.
This was a potentially life-threatening situation for me. This was tantamount to attempted murder by shunning.
If you have no ability to access income and everyone tries to send you away, when you run out of places to go, you know, death becomes a very real possibility.
I don't have solutions. But I'm reluctant to say "Well, those people just need to behave." What does that even mean if you can find yourself in the same shoes as them for getting healthier and trying to figure out how to discuss that with people?
* https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis
This is likely a factor in why there aren't any serious "politically neutral" competitors to Patreon. Even if you could limit your attack surface in terms of third party services like Cloudflare you couldn't get by without a payment processor.
I think you're asking a good question but I think that because Patreon uses a very human-centric process that starts with "hey, let's have a conversation", it may not be the right place to ask it.
If you are unwilling to have a conversation with your platform, you probably have a problem.
How are Patreon's actions not an example of differing views and "live and let live"?
It's not like Patreon is lobbying to have them exiled from society.
They're simply not doing business with someone whose gimmick alienates a large swath of Patreon's paying, and potential, user base.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akJf2oz5JOM
The "fully decentralized" internet can (does?) already currently exist today alongside our usual youtube/facebook/cloudflare/etc centralized internet. The state of centralization is entirely by user choice, not by force.
Literally the only necessary component for a decentralized internet is net neutrality - that packets are delivered without systematic blocking or throttling on the basis of content. And net neutrality, while in danger, hasn't AFAIK devolved to blocking sites for objectionable content (not yet in the west anyways)
In other words, theres a very clear answer to your conundrum of "at what point do we accept that we have different viewpoints and live and let live?". Regardless of political views or whatever else, your content ought to be routable on the internet. Everything else that we as a society have built on top of that (edge caching, content platforms, delivery systems, heck throw in DNS while we're at it) are unnecessary for a decentralized internet, so if you piss off society and nobody wants to do business with you, maybe it's fine if you're on your own.
Of course, you also argue "there are problems that people have, and things that need to be talked about, but they aren't allowed to say anything about it". That's an understandable position, but should be considered unrelated to the issue of centralized vs decentralized -- I would still not want to argue with some race-baiting troll, even if I hosted my own content instead of uploading it to youtube. I would still ban them, ignore them, blacklist them, or whatever options exist in the decentralized internet.
>The societal norms are shifting to a place where there are certain topics that are not allowed to be discussed at all even if looking at them from a critical lens
This isn't really any different from the majority of human history. Private speech - available through a text message or a DM - is still pretty unregulated (and likely will remain that way - for example iMessage is end-to-end encrypted and I suspect any chat service that moderates private messages would run into issues maintaining users). Public speech has always been heavily regulated by those who hold power - whether it's the FCC regulating TV content or being snubbed from the community when you advocate a particularly unsavory opinion at a town gathering.
So then maybe the problem is that more and more of our speech is "public speech" (like a facebook post) and not "private speech" (like a facebook direct message), and hence in practice more and more speech is being censored. I could agree with this. But that's neither a centralization problem nor a censorship problem.
I guess my viewpoint is that decentralized services (accessible enough that they don't require someone to run a server in their basement) can somewhat curtail the problem of cultural censorship. In other words, I think the average person should be able to publish what they want (no matter how stupid) without specialized knowledge and without being censored. That is what I envision.
Will this help the problem with cultural censorship? I really don't know. I just believe in the free exchange of ideas.
That said, and as others have brought up in the discussion, the banking system (Visa et al) engage in censorship fairly often as well...so the problem is certainly not limited to internet.
I guess my post is more of a general observation and complaint than a coherent idea of what should be done. But it's good to at least separate out the parts that aren't really related and argue them as separate pieces =].
If there's a fairly cogent set of guidelines I'm fine with it. I realize that it's subjective but we're not idiots and it's THEIR company.
If you went to a friends house and he had a nazi meeting in his basement you wouldn't accept "free speech" as a reason for them to be there - you'd think your friend was a Nazi.
This is a mistake; but don't worry, it's a common mistake. The mistake is to assume that human-constructed ontologies are actually capable of describing the real world, and thus that we can come up with laws or rules that CAN be assiduously (and not selectively) enforced.
This is simply wrong; laws are human constructions made up of language, an imperfect instrument that has no power by itself. There is NO WAY to apply laws without interpretation by the enforcer. It is up to some set of people we designate as agents of the law to decide what the application is.
The same is true of any rule-based system, legal or extra-legal. The rule set by itself can only provide a guide; it requires human judgement to make the rule set work in a particular scenario. Cf. Potter Stewart's famous pronouncement about obscenity: >I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description ["hard-core pornography"], and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.
Since it requires judgement to apply the abstract rule to the particular situation, it means enforcement, by its very nature, must be "selective", and there must always be an arbitrary element to it. That is, judgement, being produced by individuals with their own biases and history which they must necessarily bring to bear on the question, is always questionable.
We have mechanisms to mitigate this problem - mostly precedent and review, i.e., amortizing the problem of individual judgement over several individuals to smooth out the bumps, and recall - the ability to reject individual enforcers. But again, these mechanisms are imperfect (who watches the watchmen, and what makes those watchers any more credible, by the way?).
What's my fucking point? It's that when we begin on this quest, we should recognize our fundamental limit: we CANNOT produce an ideal solution, we are limited by metaphysics itself (the world is larger than we have words to describe). It behooves us to see, then, that the solutions we DO arrive at must be full of compromise, and must recognize all of the ways in which our system is subject to failure.
Your post, then, is a good step along this way. If what we are doing becomes worrisome, good - that worry is a check on whatever authority we have put in place, and your subjective judgements being brought to bear are a way to control the arbitrariness of authority.
But, at the end of the day, all we can really do is worry harder, speak louder, and shape and reshape our institutions, constantly trying to get them to fit the - ever-shifting - landscape of our morality.
See also: Richard Rorty, who was very fond of observing that human society is made up of ugly half-compromises.
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Well, that's all well and good; but I do notice that on Hacker News there is a very strong tendency to only report and discuss this kind of thing when it affects "conservative windbags" or people with terrible long-discredited ideas or campaigns against individual women.
It's also well worth discussion "stochastic terrorism", the phenomenon by which injecting hate material into public discussion will eventually cause someone to take it seriously. If you say "carthago delenda est" often enough someone will carry out a mass shooting in Carthage.
In response to accusations of bias, dang has stated something along the lines that people tend to view HN as having a bias contrary to their own, no matter what their own happens to be. From what I've seen that rings true.
If Patreon is a gallery or art market or auction house, and Reddit is a Café, what is Cloudflare? Are they a toll road? Private highway? Something else?
Likening any of those businesses to the closest brick and mortar equivalent is probably futile, but bear with me a moment.
In the real world, businesses generally do business on their own terms. If they don’t own their own property, they lease it, and the municipality they are in zones the land and enforces certain regulations. There might be a couple of other factors, the United States has determined race to not be a valid criteria for whether you allow them into your public facing establishment. Mostly we don’t allow sex segregation, but there are exceptions here too, like with public baths.
A Café owner has an enormous amount of leeway with who they will do business with though. By and large they can ask people to leave, or to not come back so long as the determining factor isn’t discrimination against a protected class. They can compare properties, including landlords, neighborhoods and zoning regulations. If they want to target a particular demographic, it can be as simple as making the menu bilingual or playing a particular kind of music.
Now if someone builds a private road on their own property, that is their own business, but if they build a private road under contract to the city and charge people to use it, that is the city’s business. They can’t tell Nazis not to drive on that road anymore than the city can, assuming this city is in the United States anyway, but a Café owner could absolutely tell those same Nazis in that same city to not come in. Wouldn’t even have to give a reason for it. That’s fine, cafes exist everywhere and if you wanted to open one that catered specifically to Nazis, the law isn’t going to stop you.
I think we have knee jerk reactions when it comes to services like Cloudflare or Patreon disallowing certain people. To be honest, I tried to make a good case for why they should, but my best isn’t a particularly strong legal argument. Cloudflare and Patreon didn’t lay the cables that connect my home to the rest of the Internet, my ISP did, with a charter from my city.
Cloudflare and Patreon are businesses that work better when there is a critical mass of people already using them. They work best at-scale and don’t leave a whole lot of room in the market for competitors, Cloudflare much less so than Patreon, so in a sense they almost feel like utilities or like they should be.
They’re not utilities though, or cafes or galleries or any of that. They are private businesses though, so in that sense they are a lot closer to the Café owner than to your ISP or electric utility or the nearest private tollway. They might be hard to replicate businesses, and the people they are kicking off might find it hard to build a parallel alternative that sticks, but that is life.
That said, I much prefer businesses that are consistent in their policy enforcement practices than ones that aren’t, that is just good business.
Keep in mind that some of those viewpoints are "we live, others get eradicated".
Yes, some of the ideas are objectively bad. That doesn't mean there isn't a growing censorship movement, which incidentally often uses "nazi" lingo as an excuse to selectively silence people.
Also note that I gave a nod to, and firmly believe in, not inciting violence as a core tenet of free speech. Nazis can believe whatever vile shit they want to, as long as they don't act on it.
Think about things like the Spanish Inquisition or the Salem Witch Trials for extremely clear examples. These people didn't hate the people they were attacking. They'd just become so deluded in their own self righteousness that they thought they were saving society from immense evil. In reality though that evil existed only in their head. And while Don Quixote may have only swung at windmills, in these cases many people lost their lives for doing no wrong.
---
In reality the paradox of tolerance, as it is used in common rhetoric is completely nonsensical. Popper made an extremely clear distinction between words and violence that people often ignore when appealing to his argument. When a person moves from speech to unprovoked violence, eliminate that individual from society with the greatest of urgency and severity. Until, and after, that point - tolerance thrives without condition.
Well, that wasn't even close to being the case here, was it.
Yes, but they should also be free not to, so we really just need some companies with guts to make a payment processor that to the law, nothing more, and related platforms that do the same thing.
> there's not much anyone can do in the current framework of things other than encourage decentralization
But that is ultimately at odds with "hardened policies that aren't selectively enforced". A giant platform, like paypal + patreon without ANY meddling, or a giant payment processor and a bunch of big platforms that use it, that might not just be cheaper to run, it would solve the issue more or less (until they in turn get kicked off the net by cloudflare or something, but why assume that would happen at this point, seem prematurely pessimistic). Decentralization is like "Linux on the desktop", whereas a payment processor that only respects the law really just requires money and people who can do it.
The evidence says, they do not - hate groups fail at these gives all the time because ultimately they also don't get along with anyone else.
I'd view that as the marketplace of ideas working correctly.
So in the end a company would be put in front of a choice: either choose what to allow and reject, and become legally responsible for everything that is published; or act as a neutral intermediary and assume no responsibility for the contents. Sounds fair?
The man has hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of footage of his opinions online. He is not racist...at all. And yet here you are confidently and smugly declaring your comfort with his livelihood being taken away on the basis of his racism because the issue could not be simpler in your mind.
First of all, unless you're a free speech absolutist (who believes that literally nothing supercedes free speech) then recognize and accept that someone, somewhere has to draw a line across a continuum of grey.
So we're already in the morass, whether you like it or not. You're right to worry about this question:
> But then, who decides what's bad?
But in this case, it's Patreon, trying to look out for its own best business interests. It's almost ideal. Since this is their core business they are pretty strongly incentivized to be liberal about what they allow.
You can imagine some kind of net neutrality regulation, but please realize that for it to have any effect it must be enforced. So we're talking about regulators, investigators, rulings, fines, appeals, legal defenses, etc., along with the attendant politics, of course, not to mention, soon you'll have entrenched interests to bog down any reforms or improvements to the system. Maybe as a left-leaning socialist you will be happy to hear about all this but just note that it doesn't resolve the fundamental issue. In the end, there's still a mixture of policy, enforcement, process and precedent deciding what's OK and what's not. Passing a law doesn't solve this issue, it just moves it around and probably makes it more complicated.
> The societal norms are shifting to a place where there are certain topics that are not allowed to be discussed at all
I'm not sure what you're talking about here. Anyway, this case seems to be about vigorous use of the n-word and homophobic slurs, which certainly can be discussed (and, unfortunately, are well accepted and encouraged in certain circles).
Also, keep in mind: moving the line of what is acceptable (whether to something more liberal or more conservative) doesn't change the situation at all. There are people who will test the line, wherever you draw it. In fact, for many, that's the point. They get attention (in their own circles) by testing the line and it's not bad to sometimes get banned as a result.
I agree with most of your comment, but is Patreon really free to make the decision? Assume a hypothetical "free speech absolutist" version of Patreon, who decided they wouldn't bow to outside pressure. It seems likely that that as with their short-lived free-speech-embracing competitors, the outside forces are strong enough that they would soon convince the credit card processors to refuse to continue serving them. Patreon isn't exactly forced to acquiesce, but they would have to decide that it's a hill worth dying on. Do you still view this larger picture as "almost ideal"?
That's easy: whoever owns the platform. If I own the platform, Daily Stormer isn't going to be using it. I don't want to be associated with those morons, so I'm not going to do business with them. If it's my platform and my business, I have every right to refuse to do business with those people.
If you want to be fair and equal and give everyone equal access no matter how vile their viewpoint, then you need to make a government service that doesn't discriminate. But then, you may have a big problem with the voters if the government is funding something the voters don't like. That's the nature of democratic governments: people collectively decide what they, as a nation and society, are going to allocate resources towards. So it's the voters' right to refuse to provide a platform for this unliked minority as well.
>So, there are problems that people have, and things that need to be talked about, but they aren't allowed to say anything about it.
If you feel that way, you have every right to set up your own platform and allow those people access to it. But if you're giving access to literal Nazis, I also have the right to shun you, which I will. If you want to willingly associate with that type of scum, then I'm going to assume that you're cut from the same cloth.
Who gets to decide what a "nazi" is? You? What if I say you're a nazi? Your denials just make you more guilty. That's exactly what a nazi would say, nazi.
There are also frequent comments on such articles saying that content creators can just seek another platform, which frankly seems like an obviously unhelpful suggestion. Twitter, Reddit, Patreon, and others are massive in scale and have a ubiquity and reach that isn't found elsewhere. Platforms that benefit from network effects don't face effective competition, and investors typically won't invest in new competitors in those arenas, because it is such a long shot to break through those barriers. We could argue that Patreon is not one of the platforms whose value is driven by network effects, but the underlying payment processors (e.g. Visa) definitely benefit from network effects. And of course, Visa has deplatformed many parties, including famously, Wikileaks back in 2010.
There are also examples of folks who followed that advice and left Patreon for other platforms (e.g. SubscribeStar) and then got deplatformed (e.g. by Stripe or PayPal). There are examples of lower-level entities like Visa/Mastercard _forcing_ platforms built on top of them to censor someone or risk being banned by them. Clearly, these privately-owned platforms are monopolies or oligopolies in a sense, holding access to large segments of the population with no competitive forces acting on them. Alternatively, we can look at them as being the digital public square, and therefore they should be subject to regulation that prevents them from taking action beyond what the law in their jurisdiction requires.
The big risk is this: when only a few entities funnel so much societal discourse or control our communication infrastructure or process payments, those entities making arbitrary decisions about who they serve has similar impacts/risks to the government imposing similar restrictions through the law. These companies should not act as a moral police and should not impose their own personal governance above what is minimally required by the law. Nor should they rely on the judgment of an angry mob to make decisions.
Social media platforms and the internet generally, substantially weaken the power of culture to regulate speech in the way that it used to. I don't know what we do about this. We don't want government regulating speech, and it doesn't seem like allowing social media platforms to regulate it arbitrarily is particularly good either. But the gates that culture and localism placed on speech in the past did, seemingly, serve some useful purpose.
Do we want to live in a world where speech is truly unregulated, even by shame or culture? Maybe. It's possible that the answer here is yes we do, that sunlight is always the best disinfectant, and that the truth always emerges victorious in the end. But it's also possible that those things aren't true. I don't have an answer, but I don't think one way or the other is the obviously correct path forward either.
I fail to see how this is the case. It does absolutely grant the power to regulate speech. What Social media platforms have changes is that the people who are carrying out the informal regulation of speech have shifted to being a very narrow subset of the population, and one that is overwhelmingly made up of one category of culture. Tech, especially in the Bay Area, is effectively a political monoculture. Support for Republicans is often in the single digits[0].
The evidence really does indicate that sunlight is the best disinfectant. Despite the constant concern over Trump's comments on immigrants, for example, support for immigration in the US is at record levels.[1][2] Despite the concern over explicitly fascist rallies at Charlottesville and DC, these rallies actually cased a significant drop in support for far-right.[3] And lastly, while the Republican has become a party of Trump and has adopted much of his rhetoric the result has been largely bad for the party. They lost over a dozen seats in the midterm election - surprising given that the midterms are when the Republicans tend to do well.
Yes, sunlight is the best disinfectant, and the data demonstrates it. Ironic, then, that some would want to shield these views that they despise from said disinfectant.
0. https://www.recode.net/2018/10/31/18039528/tech-employees-po...
1. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/23/us/immigration-polls-dona...
2. https://news.gallup.com/poll/235793/record-high-americans-sa...
3. https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2017/09/alt-weake...
The idea of the freedom of association also predates the existence of the United States.
The freedom of association means that organizations get to exclude people from the association. Including because of their speech.
The phrase 'deplatform' rejects of the freedom of association.
Quoting from John Stuart Mill's "On Liberty", chapter IV, "Of the Limits to the Authority of Society Over the Individual"
> It would be a great misunderstanding of this doctrine, to suppose that it is one of selfish indifference, which pretends that human beings have no business with each other's conduct in life, and that they should not concern themselves about the well-doing or well-being of one another, unless their own interest is involved. ...
> We have a right, also, in various ways, to act upon our unfavourable opinion of any one, not to the oppression of his individuality, but in the exercise of ours. We are not bound, for example, to seek his society; we have a right to avoid it (though not to parade the avoidance), for we have a right to choose the society most acceptable to us. We have a right, and it may be our duty, to caution others against him, if we think his example or conversation likely to have a pernicious effect on those with whom he associates. We may give others a preference over him in optional good offices, except those which tend to his improvement. In these various modes a person may suffer very severe penalties at the hands of others, for faults which directly concern only himself; but he suffers these penalties only in so far as they are the natural, and, as it were, the spontaneous consequences of the faults themselves, not because they are purposely inflicted on him for the sake of punishment.
It is indeed possible "to extend the bounds of what may be called moral police, until it encroaches on the most unquestionably legitimate liberty of the individual", but what I'm pointing out is that you cannot simply look at "freedom of speech" as the sole or even paramount freedom under discussion.
So the problem isn't kicking haters off a private platform, it's that corporations have grown to large.
I agree.
A business, Patreon, buys a building and sets up shop. They open booths for people to setup shop in and solicit funding for their projects. The general public can walk through the booths and choose who to support. This being a privately-owned business, and in their private property (building -> website or webserver), they reserve the right to deny entry to whomever they wish.
If I were a business owner, I would not want one of those booths to be occupied by someone reciting hate speech and scaring off other patrons (pun not intended, patron in the traditional sense) from other booths and from my business as a whole.
It is entirely possible, and in this day and age fairly easy, for those who got banned from Patreon to set up their own website hosted on their own servers in order to spread their message. I wouldn't say 'go to another platform' because the same thing would happen again. I would say 'make your own platform/website/blog'. You can set up agreements with Paypal or many other places to solicit funds. At this point, with Net Neutrality and ISPs not being able to ban you because they should be a public utility, you can not be removed from speaking how you wish. You can setup your own server easily to do this.
Caveats: net neutrality is an ideal in this scenario, since the FCC removed it. I am not 100% sure on payment providers, but I am sure there is a way to solicit funds without them in some way.
You certainly don't speak for all of us (re: "beyond").
I like to stand up on it and yell out my views. Sometimes I let my friends use it that way, too.
Some guy comes along and would like to use my soapbox to yell out his views. But I don't like him and I don't agree with his views.
Would you like the government to come force me at gunpoint to let him use my soapbox?
What you're arguing, basically, is that once my soapbox gets popular enough that lots of people want to use it, you do want the government to force me, at gunpoint, to let them use it even when I find their views repugnant.
Or, basically, what this person said, and they said it better and in fewer words:
https://twitter.com/lessdismalsci/status/1076488300188307456
That's easy, are you the only one with that soapbox? Do you own all the soapboxes? Are you a Corporation who is taking advantage of it's market dominance and near monopoly on modern free association to control public discourse?
So yes if your soapbox networks are now an integral part of public debate then the government should either regulate you or nationalize your assets for the public good. It's no different from why ISPs should be kept neutral, why power companys should be kept neutral and why public highways should be kept neutral.
Here are some excerpts from the automatically generated transcript (click the 3 dots, then "Open transcript"):
I just can't be bothered to deal with people who treat me like this it's really annoying like I you are acting like a bunch of niggers just so you know you you act like white niggers exactly how you describe black people acting is the impression I get dealing with y'all
don't expect me to them have a debate with one of your faggots then why would I bother bother you read like enough class I don't know maybe you're just acting like a nigga me have you considered that do you think white people act like this white people are meant to be polite and respectful to one another and you guys can't even act like white people
it's about gaining attention and seems like kikes are ruining everything
While one can reasonably to debate the whether Patreon should ban people based on ideology and off-site behavior, his comments do seem undeniably racist, anti-Semitic, and anti-homosexual.
> It's not about, like, actually doing any good, it's about getting attention. And I see, like, 'kikes are ruining everything'. [laughs] Good—good—good job. Should tackle field [I can't understand this sentence]. You're making your movement look like you're not full of Nazis! Great! Bravo!"
In case the context isn't clear, saying that they "look like you're not full of Nazi" is sarcasm. Of course subscription to belief in a global Jewish conspiracy makes a group look like they're full of Nazis.
It is difficult to claim that these statements were meant as an attack on blacks and Jewish people themselves. It's pretty obvious that this banning was carried out for ideological reasons. In the past, Jack Conte stated that Patreon would only ban people for speech that was spread on their platform.[1] This was flat out ignored. It looks like much of their userbase is calling them out on the questionable justifications for the banning, too.[2]
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofpbDgCj9rw
2. See comments on https://patreonhq.com/hate-speech-on-patreon-a9026e52c2cf
Edit: changed "they're behaving exactly like the groups they despise" to "they're behaving exactly like they see the groups they despise through their bigoted worldview". Crucial mis-wording on my part, as the original version made it look I was saying said groups really do behave like how the alt-right claims.
Looking through the rest of this thread, it doesn't appear to be difficult to claim that at all. Lots of people are doing so with ease. I think the issue is more about gaslighting vs honesty.
Having said that, we have to assume Benjamin’s inner thoughts to know what he really meant, so I’m not arguing we should disregard it completely because of his alledged good intentions.
Transcript: "exactly how you describe black people acting is the impression I get dealing with y'all", the last word should be "the alt-right".
Context: How is it not clear from reading this that he is saying that you act like a negative stereotype you've created? The alt-right Sargon is arguing against are (known for being) racist, anti-Semitic, and anti-homosexual. They used said slurs in the chat accompanying the livestream.
Transcript: "kikes are ruining everything"
Context: calling them out on acting like nazis - "And I see, like, 'kikes are ruining everything'. [laughs] Good—good—good job. Should tackle field [I can't understand this sentence]. You're making your movement look like you're not full of Nazis[clearly an ironic remark]! Great! Bravo!"
Context: him calling the alt-right out for turning on one of their own because he is married to a Jewish person - "It's just like how Mike Enoch was treated, when people found out his wife was Jewish. It's just like, he had to go dark, he had to go off the internet, because of the way these people treat him. It's like, holy shit, that's one of your own? Oh, he's married to a Jew, well, I guess, that's a bit of bad luck to be married before he was an alt-righter. Yes, he did, well, there we go. Kind of like 'Millenial was sucking a dick'. You know, it's like, it's crazy. You guys have no decorum. There's no level too low to go to."
[1] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1U0mQjUA0T5INc_GDkwPJ2mfh...
Further, the "kikes are ruining everything" part seems to be a paraphrasing of the alt-right: "Go and bother, like, mic.com's comment section or something. You know, they are actually getting millions of views? The thing is, they just ignore you, which is why you don't, because you're just attention-seeking. It's not about, like, actually doing any good, it's about getting attention. And I see, like, 'kikes are ruining everything'. [laughs] Good—good—good job. Should tackle field [I can't understand this sentence]. You're making your movement look like you're not full of Nazis! Great! Bravo!"
Later: "It's just like how Mike Enoch was treated, when people found out his wife was Jewish. It's just like, he had to go dark, he had to go off the internet, because of the way these people treat him. It's like, holy shit, that's one of your own? Oh, he's married to a Jew, well, I guess, that's a bit of bad luck to be married before he was an alt-righter. Yes, he did, well, there we go. Kind of like 'Millenial was sucking a dick'. You know, it's like, it's crazy. You guys have no decorum. There's no level too low to go to."
It seems clear that at least the "anti-Semitic" aspect of his comments is, in fact, deniable.
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I cant relate to leadership teams that do this, much less passionately do it with blog posts and explanations. It is arbitrary. Its within their right whether the specific cause is something I agree with or not. I can say that I wouldnt be interested.
If you wrote what this guy wrote in an email at your job you would be fired on the spot, it doesn't matter who you worked for or what industry. No one would be able to get away with this kind of speech on a public forum because it's so outside of societies agreed realm of discourse and deliberately involves language used to justify literal genocide.
Too often online the actual details of controversy are overlooked so folks can get all high minded about free speech. In all honesty it seems like a form of appeasement to me. Take a bit here, take a bit there, and eventually you end up with a gunman shooting up a synagogue and a woman being run over at a white nationalist rally.
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Patreon previously said that they only care about content on their platform. Sargon's comments weren't on Patreon. They weren't on his Youtube channel, which is presumably what Patreon money is supporting. They were made during an interview with an altogether different channel.
So the rules were changed retroactively without warning.
Next, the scary part involves another company called Subscribe Star.
After the ban was announced, a number of creators decided they didn't want to put all their eggs in one basket and opened up accounts on Subscribe Star.
Several hours later PayPal cut service to Subscribe Star without explanation.
Jaqueline Hart, who made the decision to ban Sargon, used to work at PayPal.
It certainly looks like she called in a favour to kill a competing service.
A tech lawyer who runs a channel called YoutuberLaw is trying to file an FTC complaint about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2ySC7edHO0
>"This month, the site’s moderators received a complaint about Mr. Benjamin, who had risen to fame railing against diversity and feminism during the GamerGate movement in 2014. Mr. Benjamin used the N-word and anti-gay language during an interview posted to YouTube on Feb. 7, Patreon found."
I could be wrong, but I'm under the impression Benjamin used that word to insult white supremacists, whom he evidently does not count himself among. It wasn't very smart of him to think everybody would be okay with it just because he chose the 'right' target.
It's... pretty vitriolic. I'm not totally comfortable with even quoting the redacted version, but here goes nothing:
>“I just can’t be bothered with people who chose to treat me like this. It’s really annoying. Like, I — . You’re acting like a bunch of n_____s, just so you know. You act like white n_____s. Exactly how you describe black people acting is the impression I get dealing with the Alt Right. I’m really, I’m just not in the mood to deal with this kind of disrespect.”
>“Look, you carry on, but don’t expect me to then have a debate with one of your f__gots.…Like why would I bother?…Maybe you’re just acting like a n____r, mate? Have you considered that? Do you think white people act like this? White people are meant to be polite and respectful to one another, and you guys can’t even act like white people, it’s really amazing to me.”
Would it be immoral (or amoral, either one) of my employer to fire me employed if I gave a tech talk and started throwing the N-word around?
Patreon has fairly clear rules on behavior; they're not obligated to keep anyone as their client if they start breaking them.
I'd also argue that Patreon isn't obligated at all to help him earn money here. It's not a employee employer relationship here, and they can choose to not to continue to help a person that they deem harmful to other customers.
On a single platform. Nobody's preventing Mr. Benjamin from making money; they're just not allowing him to use one specific platform.
He's welcome to sign up for Hatreon, or to use a payment processor directly.
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- Account shutdown without notice
- Lack of appeals process until publicity and a wave of de-subscribes hit the platform
- Reversal of Conte's promise to only police content directly supported by patrons
- Surprise morality stance and language, "reforming" and requiring a "full-throated apology"
While one cannot condone Benjamin's behavior, Patreon is not being honest about its mercurial behavior, shifting policies, and repositioning as a scold. So creators who ethically address controversial topics (i.e. not Benjamin) become nervous.
I love what Patreon does for creators. But this deeply disturbs me.
I'm getting a little tired of people who've made a career saying what you "can't say on TV" and then pretending to be surprised when their content gets pulled.
I'm getting a little tired of people who've made a career saying what you "can't say on TV" and then pretending to be surprised when their content gets pulled.
Wait - how do you know what people's intentions are?
Your entire comment is premised on the idea that 'people who've made a career' - as in "all of em" since you said "people who ."- are in fact trolls who deserve what they get. First you know their secret intentions (making a career out of it) and second you deem them unworthy of having their content even remotely worth thinking about preserving before being pulled. You're tired, after all.
Please don't end up in a position of power, kind sir/ma'am.
The content itself is irrelevant to my point as it is a general statement about adding shock value to any act and the faux-consequences of it.