Y Combinator blacklists founder of Gab.ai
twitter.com
twitter.com
We do not allow harassment, for which Andrew unfortunately set a new bar in our community. You can look at his Twitter or Facebook for plenty of public examples, to say nothing of what he's said privately.
As per our previous comments, when a founder violates our ethics statement, we remove them from the community.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CxAg4AXXcAITru4.jpg:large
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https://twitter.com/torbahax/status/797110760556167168
From a pure business standpoint, fuck that guy. He didn't really articulate his views in any way that could remotely be considered constructive, and if the rest of his behavior matches that, it's difficult to imagine keeping him around.
I really can't understand such a attitude.
Here are links proving my point: http://www.dailydot.com/irl/simple-pickup-youtube-sexual-ass...
http://www.dailycal.org/2012/02/29/youtube-pickup-artists-co...
Here's the petition to remove their YouTube channel -> www.change.org/p/youtube-com-end-street-harassment-remove-simple-pickup-s-youtube-channel-13bef5b3-1dcc-4f8a-be88-ef3f69cc7e1c
They are still making money with their Project Go program which shows their instructor Willy molesting a woman without her knowing she was being filmed.
Seems like this type of harassment is an embodiment of what you would disagree with.
Or were you just not aware of this?
Edit: Actually watched some of the videos mentioned. Totally amazed how anyone can get offended by prank videos and doesn't know about actors involved.
But if you do much less, but to people YC has to do business with, that has real consequences.
If they were motorboating Marc Andreessen without consent, for instance, they wouldn't need news coverage and video to drop them.
EDIT: I don't mean this to be cynical so much as derived from fiduciary duty.
Note that he did not simply tweet the words "Build the wall." That's not what happened. What he did is he screenshotted another YC founder's private facebook wall post, in which she says she is scared for her safety. And he publicly tweeted her words while adding "Build the wall" as mocking commentary.
Contrarian views are one thing. Addressing the people who fund your company like a belligerent troll is another.
You're entitled to free speech, you're not entitled to a captive ear to hear it.
Sure, in the sense of the "liberals and safe spaces" macro topic, I'll concede that.
But YC is big on bringing in founders from other countries and giving them the tools to be successful in America.
In those scenarios YC is the foundation of their life in the country. Funding, documentation, network, etc. To have voices in the group that's supposed to help you start talking about "build the wall" and deporting people, especially in the context of the larger Trump political movement?
Yeah, if a company paid for me to come to a foreign land and do business, but members started talking about deporting all the guys like me and building a wall to keep them out, I would feel uncertain about my future, my business, and my residency. unsafe.
I think it's completely reasonable in this case.
Looks to me like free speech is still free and trolling at work still has consequences and there's not much to see here unless you're personally involved with one of the companies.
I've excluded people for less, but then I haven't as YC asked sometimes awkward people to be stressed out for a long period of time while saying that diversity of opinion is valued.
To be fair, I think companies and individuals should have a right to disassociate with anyone for any reason they choose (yes including the bad reasons). But they should at least be honest about it, rather than hiding behind some veil of "it's abusive behaviour". Just admit you don't like the opinion before it cross that line, and purge appropriately.
Ironically a captive ear is exactly what SJW's demand, and if you fail to oblige you're a (delete as appropriate) straight/white/male/able-bodied/cis-gendered/dudebro who is "part of the problem" and "literally Hitler". I'm so disappointed in how partisan YC has become, capitulating completely to prevailing meme of SJWs. It's becoming less about "make something people want" and more "care about what people think".
This had little to do with politics. The guy mocked a YC founder who expressed fear for his safety, and called another YC founder a "coward", among other things.
And just a couple weeks ago YC didn't capitulate to demands to cut ties with Peter Thiel over his support of Trump.
What other instances are you referring to?
When you're a dissident or ideological minority in any context, it's absolutely essential at all times to be the kindest, gentlest, sweetest person in the room. That way, when they ban you for "feeling unsafe," it's obvious to everyone what's going on.
Obviously OP wasn't actually a danger to anyone. That's ridiculous. But there isn't any world where you can be a dissident and also be a dick, and get away with it.
How would a sane adult feel like they were in some kind of danger by someone wanting stronger controls on immigration?
> a zero tolerance policy for promoting terrorism
Everyone has their own version of acceptable free speech. Him using 'free speech' as his tagline and yet having restrictions is hypocritical.
This is something a lot of young folks don't seem to understand. You can say anything you want. Go for it. And you will own the consequences of what you said, whatever they might be.
I offer this as a general comment. Not taking sides on the issue highlighted by the post. I simply think it is important to point out this reality in case it is lost in all the nonsense this election has managed to produce.
Not sure this makes sense. It's like saying you are free to murder someone. But then you have to live with the consequences. Which leads the concept of freedom ad absurdum.
My point is that freedom of speech has never been unlimited. In my country it is slightly more restrictive than in the US but even the US does not have a 100% perfect freedom of speech. And that is a good(!) thing.
Examples for the US that apparently are exceptions to free speech: - Incitement / fighting words - False statement of facts - Child pornography - Commercial speech (special rules apply) I am not sure if you are allowed to insult a police officer.
You can say anything you want in public. And someone can still run you over with a truck if they don't like it. They would go to jail, of course.
I see a lot of young people out there saying and doing really dumb things. Yes, you do have freedom of speech, but it isn't a Captain America shield that will protect you from the consequences of what you say, where you say it and to whom you said it.
Like the guy who brought out a "Never Trump" sign in the middle of a Trump rally. He got roughed-up good. And, of course, this wasn't right. The people who attacked him need to be charged with assault. And he needs to truly reflect on the idea that if you do something like that you could very well end-up in the hospital or worst.
In other words: Freedom of speech doesn't mean someone can behave like a class-A moron. Well, actually, no, they can, but they better be ready to face whatever the consequences might be.
It says absolutely nothing about what private parties (or companies) can do about speech.
e.g. If you come into my house and start shouting racial slurs, I don't have to honor your "free speech". I can rightly kick you out of my house. The same goes for any private company.
But who should be held accountable for those consequences?
For example, what about a woman who's struck by a visibly drunk man after telling him to "fuck off"? Should she be held accountable because she should have known better? Should the man be held accountable for his actions regardless of what she said? What about when the consequences of a statement are entirely unintended and unpredictable, which is happening more and more often these days? What about when a joke between friends becomes a public relations nightmare when overheard outside the necessary context?
This is such a meaningless slogan I don't know where to begin. Nobody expects their speech to be free of consequence, otherwise they'd never say anything in the first place. What they want is speech which achieves their intent, which is rapidly becoming all but impossible. It's like coding, only without the pair programming, test driven development, and strong typing.
It's the Twitter for free speech.
I know Milo was banned based on the accusations that he'd orchestrated harassment of Leslie Jones, but I haven't heard of anyone being banned simply for expressing a political position.
As far as hashtag manipulation goes, I'm not sure what you mean. If you just mean they don't put some hashtags on trending, that may or may not be a bad approach to promoting healthy debate, but it's not a free speech issue.
Yes, they control hashtags. It is a censorship issue. They lie about what's trending, every, single, day.
There's a global problem with Twitter censorship, to the point it has a Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_Twitter
2) The Wikipedia page primarily concerns cases where Twitter is ordered to engage in censorship by other countries, not Twitter choosing to censor opinions on its own . I wish they would tell Ergodan where to stick it, but that's not the same as them posing a threat to your speech or mine (assuming you're not from Turkey).
Let me ask you an unambiguous question. I am a citizen of the United States of America, a country with a strong tradition of freedom of speech. Can you offer me any reason to fear that I am going to be censored by Twitter for expressing an opinion (liberal, conservative, fascist, even)? To be perfectly clear, and avoid confusing matters with the issue of harassment, say that I do not @-mention other users.
https://twitter.com/BrittPettibone/status/797186228894322688
On the other hand, I can't quite replicate her search. When I search, I get more results than she does, maybe not as many as I'd expect, but importantly, not the same as her. I can't say "obviously there's nothing here" but I also don't think there's a smoking gun.
If you're concerned about this, you really should not be pointing me to one tweet by one user. You should have reams of evidence, documented, with a timeline, with comparisons to what other users see, etc, etc. If you don't care about convincing people who haven't already bought in, that's ok, but if you do want to persuade, you're going to have to provide something better than this one tweet. (Case in point, downthread, we have a person who's convinced they were shadowbanned, then all of a sudden they check, and they aren't: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12935624).
There is literally no defense of this because it was so obviously a bad-faith interpretation, and yet other people have very obviously put people in actual danger, like Spike Jones tweeting George Zimmerman's parents home address, and nothing happened to them. Johnson, whatever you might think of him personally, was banned forever for something he obviously did not even do when you look at the tweet. If they like you, you can say almost anything. If they don't almost anything can get you suspended.
The hashtag trending thing is another case of this, if they basically like your message then they'll let it trend, if they don't then they'll suppress it. You can only really derive that this is happening from observing in very specific ways, no one actually tells you they do this. They have other tricks too, if an undesirable hashtag gains popularity, out of nowhere a misspelled hashtag autocompletes, to "nudge" you to a dead end hastag that nobody is listening to. It's fairly obvious once you become aware of it, because popular hashtags autocomplete, unpopular or not-trending ones don't, but "roach motel" hashtags somehow bypass this. Nobody knows globally what this single corporation decides to let be widely heard and what it invisibly suppresses. It is a free speech issue because private or not, as the Arab Spring stuff demonstrated how much influence Twitter has on society, which makes it one. This is the bog-standard, not-full-of-shit liberal position. It's even Chomsky-endorsed.
The other thing is that this is just a tough way to argue. There's massive amounts of harassment on twitter, and enforcement is incredibly haphazard. Did Spike Lee get a pass because he's a liberal? Or because in 2012, Twitter was completely clueless about any kind of response to harassment?
2) Hashtags: as it stands, everything you've said is your own personal observation and too vague for me to even try and confirm. Rather than repeat myself, let me just reference my other comment about doing the work to prove your accusations: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12936414
3) I will however, repeat my question from before: is there any political opinion that I can utter as an American citizen that will get me banned from Twitter?
Regarding the Spike Lee thing, I'd say he got a pass because he's a celebrity, but who knows. This is kind of my point. You have to piece together pattern out of Johnson's activity on and off Twitter to decide that maybe he was trying to get deray killed by paying people for his home address. On the other hand spike lee directly tweeted "here's george zimmerman's address, share this as much as you can" and nothing happened to him at all. Twitter was aware of it, because many, many people made them aware of it, and they pay special attention to their celebrity accounts. it didn't happen off twitter, it happened on twitter. and it wasn't tangential to some other threat, it was a direct threat. on twitter. tons of people reported it. I just can't hurdle this one. they let it happen and they didn't care.
the commonality across these is that in the best circumstances you're probably a scummy person if you do that, Johnson or Lee, but it's extra terrible when people just tweet addressed with death exhortations and they didn't even know or care if it was correct info. johnson was pretty scummy but his point was made, if you're the new york times nobody seriously is going to hold you to that. if you're spike lee, nobody is seriously going to hold you to that. if you're charles johnson, you're booted off twitter, lose your internet hosting and two dozen newspapers write stories about you.
2. it's not actually that vague, you could take what I said and watch and see if you can observe it. I gave you enough information if you were truly interested. You're not obligated to believe me or do it, of course, I was just sharing my experience. I kind of have a problem proving this is intentional, because I don't run twitter. i used to live close by what I suspected was a crack house once, people were always coming and going, and doing crack outside. Maybe the police could prove it, I can't. but I can tell you what I saw.
You are very correct that it's hard to tell what is intentional and what is not on the part of twitter. I see a lot of bogus claims of shadowbanning where it's really just that twitter is eventually-consistent, and sometimes you try to look at data from one location and its there, someone in another country can see it, though. Roach-motel hashtags, some are more obvious than others, and some are just legitimate misspellings that catch on because that's what everybody types. Example, for a while podestaleaks was autocompleting as podestraleaks. On the other hand, SpiritCooking trended for almost 24 hours before it stopped autocompleting and was replaced with spiritualcooking, which roach-moteled you into ancient sparse tweets about cooking. I can't prove anything, but come on. As far as straight up suppressing trending tweets, it's not even arguable. things trend, then abruptly stop autocompleting and drop off the site globally. they already do this to prevent spam, and it's obvious they do it to shut up some hashtags.
3. Have we not yet gotten to the point where that odious xkcd cartoon has been thoroughly debunked? Freedom of speech goes far beyond being a simple ban on things you can or cannot say or else you will be punished by some authority.
I am sorry if this is long and rambling, I wanted to say what I've been seeing because I am not the only one who has made these observations, and this is a particularly good place I could say it and people with more ability than me to investigate this might see it.
Twitter apparently thinks that trying to effect positive change, to-wit, ending the wide scale child abuse and holding the abusers accountable to law, is a bad thing.
If the creator has pivoted to the alt-right, it's a pretty sure guess that it will wind up being another 8chan/stormfront/what have you.
Let people see who they want to see, but if they & enough of their friends say "don't show me X" then don't show them X.
insulting people or a group of people is not free speech anymore it's actually a crime.
This is incorrect. https://popehat.com/2016/06/11/hello-youve-been-referred-her...
https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=de&tl=en&u=h...
Actually there was even a law case against 'Böhmermann' wo made a satire for Erdogan, actually it was pretty harmful but the law said it was a satire so he was protected. There is a small line between free speech and being harmful and it also should be decided on a case by case basis, for some. But other people actually use our right to free speech to do harm and that is bad since that will sooner or later hurt our own right.
I am genuinely curious about this statement. Can you name something that you can say in Germany that I cannot say in the United States? I'm pretty sure I can come up with some examples going the other way.
If I would've been banned, I would try to address that as well, but not in such a hateful manner than he did.
But you didn't insult me because that wasn't a statement regarding my character, you clearly established you don't want a conversation, and you caused me no harm whatsoever, direct or otherwise.
#SticksAndStones
That's the problem with restrictions on 'insulting and objectionable' speech. Beyond the fact you just demonstrated how easy it is to get wrong by misapplying the very rules you brought up in this discussion, it also opens the door to claiming any statement regarding someone's character (such as 'incompetent', 'unemployed', 'hypocrite', 'terrorist', etc) is an insult, regardless of how true it is.
Speech becomes harmful when it isolates and marginalizes. It does not become harmful just because it's offensive or enraging. So in the context of this story calling everyone a 'cuck' wasn't harmful, but the otherwise innocuous phrase 'build the wall' was, and coming up with a set of rules which fairly and consistently cover cases like that is likely impossible.
(I don't have any information about this beyond skimming the current thread and looking at a few of the things people have linked to.)
So the guy who literally invented neoreaction isn't suppressed by YC because of his views then it is pretty unlikely you're getting persecuted because of yours.
Nick Denton constantly overreached in using freedom of speech as a cover for just simply fucking with people until it blew up in his face. Don't be the alt-right's version of that. You can afford to be magnanimous and give some gesture of conciliation.
Do you really want to be giving Pao material to work with?
Fighting censorship is serious business, forget this teacup war, nobody will remember any of it in a year.