Why Shopify doesn't kick Breitbart off
medium.com
medium.com
While I respect the decision to remain neutral, I have more respect for companies that say no to hate on their platforms. There is no requirement for them to provide a platform for it, and I think it's courageous for companies to have human morals, too many don't.
Free speech - the concept, not the amendment - would not work in the current connected world if every service provider had to "ok" your message before it got out.
One thing I think should be differentiated though is certain types of communication channels. I think internet access should be protected for freedom of speech. Selling merchandise online though is not fundamental to that speech though and should not be protected. Similarly I don't think a domain name is a fundamental requirement (in the case of the Daily Stormer).
This would make a great piece of cyberpunk dystopian fiction. Humanity in a far off future finds its codified moral compass not in religious texts, not in the spoken words of religious leaders, and certainly not in books written by philosophers. But rather, in corporate contracts copy-pasted together by Employee #5 at some hyper-growth startups during the Early Years.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13608777
So, I could argue that the fact that it is being discussed indicates that it may be a little ambiguous after all. It's worth noting that your final conclusion was that the symbol "screamed Nazi" when you saw it, and that you could understand it not being sufficient.
Organizations like Breitbart thrive on "reasonable" people's willingness to give them a tremendous benefit of the doubt. They're like a little kid who lies down on top of the covers and plays with toys when you tell them to "go to bed." And a lot of people who should really know better step up and say, "technically they did what you said, I see nothing wrong with that."
May I make a suggestion? Just entertain for a brief moment that you are the one deceiving yourself. And then go back on with your day.
I have considered what you say. But understand that I'm not calling them Nazis because of what's in their store. I'm just amazed that they don't even bother to hide it.
That said, we're talking about a site conceived by five Jewish guys (even if one not ethnically), which declares itself unapologetically pro-Isreal[1] and which is confirmed by the NYT[2].
Are you really sure those images are enough to declare them Nazis?
[1] http://www.breitbart.com/big-journalism/2015/11/17/breitbart...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/16/magazine/breitbart-alt-ri...
https://store.breitbart.com/collections/mens/products/e-plur...
Calling this a Nazi parteiadler is pretty absurd.
Don't confuse "I am in favor of small government" with actually being in favor of small government. The American right wing has been playing that stupid game for decades.
http://www.gettyimages.com/detail/illustration/american-eagl...
The phone companies may be regulated as public utilities but most of my friends don't use the phone company's voice services anymore. Instead they call on Facebook Messenger or Line or WhatsApp which are not regulated as public utilities.
I don't know where to draw the line. Kicking them off say youtube? Maybe. Kicking them off the entire internet? I'm not so sure. Allowing them to stay on the internet (if you agree banning them from the internet is going too far) requires some companies to carry their content.
Email and phone conversations are private communication. Breitbart is public communication. There is a difference.
Shopify is just one of many ecommerce platforms. There are simple roll-your-own ones as well. If they ban someone, there is no major impedements to getting their speech out still.
Right now all I see is shopify profiting from hate, not defending free speech. Brietbart can go set up opencart on a vps.
I think most people would agree that if you keep things private that even a private entity shouldn't expose that. But if you broadcast the information publicly, then you are now liable to be held to a different standard.
So if a group started holding advertising public WhatsApp calls where they'd discuss plans to exterminate minority groups then I think WhatsApp would be OK in canceling their account (assuming its consistent with their TOS).
I don't think messaging apps should be able to collude though. This should be at a case by case, company by company basis.
If ISIS had a Verizon phone number that they publicized, I don't think it'd be stepping over a line for Verizon to shut that down. But if it was just a normal phone line, not advertised to the public, then Verizon has no way of knowing what it's used for.
Likewise if ISIS had an email address kill_them_all@gmail.com and advertised that this was the ISIS email address, yep. It's time for Google to revoke that. But if it's just disc_golf_playa_69@gmail.com and no one knows it's ISIS, then no one knows it's ISIS.
Breitbart isn't hiding its hatred, and it isn't hiding its store. Shopify doesn't have to infringe on anyone's privacy to realize they're running a store that lets people profit from hatred and racism.
There's no way to ban someone from the Internet. But they can be banned from various corporate sites if the corporation wants nothing to do with them. Which is what has been happening.
Even common carriers are not strictly dumb pipes.
So right now things dovetail nicely into morally defensible stances, but there is no guarantee things will coincide this way in the future which is why we defend free speech in more absolutist terms (with special carve outs).
Not all of us live in USA. Free speech is a universal right, independent of the platform.
Now US government respects this freedom and executes it on it's platform, that's the public space.
Now, on the other hand, many US companies don't give you the same freedom. They don't allow the free speech on their platforms.
We should be thinking whether it's good or bad and don't muddle the discussion with the American-specific PoV.
I personally don't like to see companies having any morals. There's nothing courageous about it. I would like to see companies have ethics instead and follow them to the best of their abilities. Ours is the privilege of judgment.
Yes, absolutely. Corporations are people and don't need to take moral or political stances, especially when there is still so much work to be done just getting Corporations to behave at all ethically.
"Segregationists have again assumed their pedestals in the Justice Department, the White House and many other American temples. Paper alone won’t drive them out. Start throwing rocks." [1]
as hate speech?
If yes, should we ban WaPo?
If not, why not? Who decides? By what standards?
Private entities which are not de-facto monopolies (like Google) have the right to do as they please, but they should publish VERY clear rules, which will then apply to anyone, regardless of political affiliation.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/made-by-history/wp/2017/...
That's what I keep hearing, and yet a company in Denver was forced by law to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple against his religious morals. Why does that not apply to internet companies?
> On November 8th, the day of the US election, the whole world got more black and white. People in the center have been called upon to choose sides. In a way, my position is an appeal to preserve some of the gray in the world. All solutions necessarily have to come from the middle ground. No progress happens when ideas are censored and everyone sorts into one of two camps.
You don't even have to pick and choose, the headline story on the 'bart right now:
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/08/20/source-mc...
It's not Trump's fault he doesn't do a lot of briefings and just says whatever the hell whenever, it's the Whitehouse staff and NatSec Advisor!
It's a huge chilling effect no one really discusses very much, and is why I was originally so obsessed with the Bitcoin idea - finally a payment method no one could subvert to force their political and moral ideology on you.
The level of censorship the typical banking partner (e.g. merchant account) exerts on a business is probably the largest out of any vendor by an order of magnitude - perhaps only shared in scale by telecommunications/hosting provider.
Wait until you hear about how accepting US Silicon Valley companies are about female nipples! Or pornography! That's heavily censored by many companies.
are you sure that this isn't just left wing propaganda trying to reduce the influence of conservatives? don't forget, all of this is just a simple power struggle, and we're the pawns.
I became interested and downloaded a lot of them and proceeded to watch. There was nothing there! Everything he said seemed to be straight out of 90s/early 2000s policies and campaign promises. Some dude spat on another dudes face and got punched.
Now I'm wondering if I should read what is on Breitbart and Daily Stormer.
In this new world, companies need to recognize the importance of free speech when it's within their right to control the same. I laud shopify for acknowledging their power and place in the e-commerce world, and for doing the right thing.
If corporations are the new government, then they should live by Othello's saying - "I Disapprove of What You Say, But I Will Defend to the Death Your Right to Say It"
IMO this is a dangerous conflation.
Many large internet companies are monopolies. Anti-trust mechanisms should be used to force competitive market places. But there are substantive differences between being the far-and-away best option in a competitive market place, and the sorts of things we typically call utilities.
This comment on a story about Shopify is even more disturbing. Amazon or Facebook or Google... okay. But Shopify?! Nothing about Shopify is utility-like. Shopify isn't even a monopoly, let alone a natural one.
If it's not illegal or doesn't fit into one of a few categories that cause legal headaches for the platform (porn, guns, etc) you can sell it. If people don't like it they can just not buy it.
If you hate the presence of a particular seller so much then don't go to the flea market.
The simple fact is that Shopify, as a business, supports Breitbart. This article presents an inflated sense of importance of their role in policing the world.
> To kick off a merchant is to censor ideas and interfere with the free exchange of products at the core of commerce. When we kick off a merchant, we’re asserting our own moral code as the superior one. But who gets to define that moral code? Where would it begin and end? Who gets to decide what can be sold and what can’t? If we start blocking out voices, we would fall short of our goals as a company to make commerce better for everyone. Instead, we would have a biased and diminished platform.
They are making that decision. Their decision is to act as a service provider that does not pass judgement on any users of their platform operating within the law. There is nothing wrong with this decision - it is a non-decision.
I'm more perturbed by providers that choose to take a side. Those providers are now implicitly morally approving of all remaining users of their platform.
They would have been better off not making a statement than making the one they did.
You claim that this argument is disingenuous, ie that the argument is not sincere. It seems sincere to me.
I think it's a pretty convincing argument. Free speech doesn't mean a whole lot if you can't buy pen and paper, or engage some web company to host your website, or sell merchandise (so this post argues).
That said -- there are products that Shopify does (and would) kick a user for selling. Shopify isn't neutral, in fact, they're saying Breitbart is acceptable.
No. Things that get banned almost always have significant political content.
Homosexual content (not necc. porn) comes to mind as a perfect example of "whole classes of goods and services" that are also very much political speech. "obscene speech" (see The Howl trial) is another famous example of an attempt to re-brand "political speech" as an apolitical "whole class of goods and services".
Taking some class of controversial goods and services and branding it as "not political" is just begging the question. It's saying "this thing is so obviously bad that discussion of its acceptability is beyond the scope of our current politics." IMO saying something is "beyond politics" is the ultimate political judgement.
If you look at list of banned goods and services, most of them are not politically related, but are related to liability, abuse potential and (probably) payment processor restrictions.
I'm not saying that banning whole classes of goods doesn't have an impact on free speech.
Yet there is still a fundamental difference between having a list of prohibited goods / services and removing a member selling allowed goods and services because you don't like their politics.
The first one is banning the sale of pornographic products on your platform, the second is banning the sale of (otherwise permissible) t-shirts by pornography companies on your platform.
Whether you see it as Breitbart paying them, or Shopify paying Breitbart; both are profiting by the presence of the other party.
I guess it would take other major clients to start leaving the service to make them change their minds. So if you wanted to pressure Shopify, petition the other clients.
Crying "free speech" over issues of incitement or violence is the bread-and-butter of the alt-right, and I'm deeply curious as to why Shopify decided to employ that tactic.
> In a way, my position is an appeal to preserve some of the gray in the world. All solutions necessarily have to come from the middle ground.
This is bankrupt, morally and intellectually.
I'm not sure why they block the adult industry. Perhaps extremely high rates of credit card fraud?
To some people, "defending free speech" only means protecting swastikas, but not female nipples. Why aren't business willing to defend my right to sell a double penetration!
Do you have any link of them claiming to be nazis or taking nazis stances about something? Or do you just call nazi anyone who disagrees with you? Not trying to pick a fight, just honestly asking.
But for some reason a good portion of academia (to not say most) labeled right as authoritarian and violent, and left as humanitarian and progressive. Hell, even Wikipedia and Google definitions says that national socialism is a far right-wing movement. So I don't blame you, definitions are a bit messy
I actually think the 2D version discussed in your link makes a lot of sense overall. But I think it's a mistake to label the horizontal axis as "Left/Right." Just label it "Collectivist/Individualist" like the vertical is labeled "Authoritarian/Libertarian."
Do you realize what you are saying here?
* Right-wing is usually in favor of free market and free enterprise, whilst NSAP stole private property (mostly from Jews) and heavily controlled the economy, also got out of the international financial system.
* Right-wing is usually against gun controls, whilst NSAP was very gun control.
* Right-wing is usually pro free speech for everyone no matter what. NSAP was not pro free speech. Government literally ran the media.
* Right-wing is mostly against welfare state, while NSAP was very pro welfare state. In fact Otto von Bismarck (a personal hero for Hitler) was the creator of the welfare state as we know it.
They do, however share some nationalism views and don't like open borders, and think that protectionism is ok. So there's that.
Nope; while that's a libertarian point of view also shared (though typically balanced against other concerns, for those not primarily libertarians) by a number of center- and moderate-right (and center- and moderate-left) groups.
> Right-wing is usually against gun controls, whilst NSAP was very gun control.
That's a fairly recent quirk of the American Republican party, not true of the general right-wing.
> Right-wing is usually pro free speech for everyone no matter what. NSAP was not pro free speech. Government literally ran the media.
Free speech, is again, a libertarian position with fairly broad support from the moderate left to moderate right, though those that aren't primarily libertarians on both sides tend to be likely to favor significant restrictions because of competing priorities. Pure free speech has never been a position typifying the right wing.
> > Right-wing is mostly against welfare state, while NSAP was very pro welfare state
No, the NSDAP was not pro-welfare state. (The welfare state is not just any state that does more than libertarian minarchists would prefer.)
If a guy says offensive stuff in a bar and keeps starting fights, sooner or later you'll have two groups of people. The ones who don't want to hang around with him any more, and the ones who are okay with his behaviour.
All of which, frankly, is pretty much covered by the obvious XKCD comic.
And yeah, there's plenty of grey in the world. But I'll let you in on a secret: even the grey stuff doesn't like Breitbart.
Free Speech is more than just a legal right, it is an important social institution. We impose stricter controls on government entities than we do on business entities, but that doesn't mean that business entities don't have huge effects of the freeness of speech in our culture.
>Refusing to do business with someone isn't censorship, _it's speech_.
It is censorship and it is also speech. Some types of this speech are not legal, for example: Refusing to do business with someone based on their race is illegal.
It's not entirely clear to me that we as a society have thought through the consequences of making political discrimination wholey legal.
Do we allow businesses to blacklist customers based on political affiliation?
Do we allow businesses to blacklist customers who support abortion or gay marriage?
Do we allow employers to fire you if you don't agree with them politically?
> No-one's campaigning to remove Breitbart's license to do business
You are campaigning to compel Shopify to say what you want and in doing so impinge on the speech of another. This assaults not just Breitbart's freedom of speech, but also Shopify's. While legal, this is also directly harmful the freeness of speech in our society.
And yes, some forms of speech can be used to close down other speech. Online harassment is an obvious example but I seriously doubt it's what you had in mind.
Incidentally, the answer to your above questions is: in many states, actually, they do. If that's something that concerns you, maybe campaign to make that illegal.
Blatant fake news are also not freedom of speech, are they?
Furthermore, why is hate speech protected by freedom of speech, is it so that dictators can't accuse people critisizing them of hate speech?
I believe in Germany you are correct, yes.
>why is hate speech protected by freedom of speech, is it so that dictators can't accuse people critisizing them of hate speech?
In a decision on a 1st Amendment case Samuel Alito wrote:
"Speech that demeans on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, age, disability, or any other similar ground is hateful; but the proudest boast of our free speech jurisprudence is that we protect the freedom to express “the thought that we hate.”"
I see legally protecting hate speech as the 'cost' of not having someone else decide what counts as allowable speech.
I live in France where there are stricter limits to speech. Quoting Wikipedia on French hate speech laws, French "laws forbid any communication which is intended to incite discrimination against, hatred of, or harm to, anyone because of his belonging or not belonging, in fact or in fancy, to an ethnicity, a nation, a race, a religion, a sex, or a sexual orientation, or because he or she has a handicap ."
That's all well and good for me...up until the point where someone starts questioning what a nation is, for example. Or what an ethnicity is.
We also can't deny crimes against humanity and genocides here. I wouldn't want to do so, but having that restriction on speech means that there is someone charged with deciding whether something rises to the point of genocide (where denial is illegal and punished by law) or 'merely' a mass killing (deny it all you like). Given the choice between the French and American laws on hate speech, I'd prefer living under the latter.
So what does that mean? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech
And it's because banning any speech is a slippery slope. Many people on reddit would make the argument supporting Trump at all is hate speech. In the US, yelling fire in a crowded theater and threats specifically against the president are I believe the only two major restricts on free speech. The question "If x isn't allowed, than why is y" would get asked constantly, so it's better to just allow it all and let society work it out.
Free speech in the US is basically:
1) don't do anything that would be a slam-dunk defamation lawsuit.
2) don't tell people to commit crimes
3) don't try to play technicality games with the above rules (e.g. "I only said I wish X were dead, not that my followers should murder X).
Following those rules doesn't necessarily mean someone won't try to harass you via the courts but that happens for all sorts of issues not related to free speech as well.