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Comment by acoyfellow | Hacker News Reader

Breaking: Gab Upset by the same treatment they promise in their legal terms: "Termination We may terminate your access to and use of the Services, at our sole discretion, at any time and without notice to you." [1]

1- https://gab.com/about/tos

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Most companies have something in their ToS to the effect of "we can do whatever we want" -- that doesn't mean they're all the same. For example, Stripe and PayPal both have essentially the same ToS. But only PayPal has so many "banned for no reason" horror stories that there are multiple websites dedicated to cataloging them.

Don’t conflate this story with “banned for no reason”. There are plenty of reasons to ban Gab.

Are they doing anything illegal?

Do they have to be?

You don't have to do anyting illegal for me not to want to conduct business with you.

In most countries, yes.

But illegality is not the issue here. People simply have a right not to be associated with hate.

> a right not to be associated with hate

This is neither a right in any theoretical system of human rights I've seen, nor is there any practical way to disassociate people from a basic human emotion.

Free association implies the freedom to not associate. You can’t make people be associated with hate groups.

Also, don’t be cute about “hate”. We aren’t talking about the human emotion and you know it.

In the context of this conversation people don't have the right to disassociate with anyone they don't like. I'm not being "cute" about hate, and whatever you think hate is isn't relevant to my point. People simply do not have the right to do business with others chosen entirely from their own personal discretion. The US government can and does force businesses to provide services, at the risk of that business's existence, to unsavory entities.

Affiliation with a hate group is not a protected characteristic.

Banning Gab is an attack on Free Speech.

I strongly believe that it's not.

If PayPal bans Gab because they dislike the speech available on Gab, it is literally an attack on Free Speech. I understand you feel differently.

I don't know what Gab is, or what its typical content is like, though I'm getting an idea from the replies to this tweet. But the principle of free speech has nothing to do with the right of a company to use Paypal's services. It's to do with the right of individuals to say what they like without government incarcerating or otherwise harming them or their ability to speak.

If an entity stifles speech that entity is against Free Speech.

If your belief is that PayPal doing business with Gab is free speech, you have no idea what free speech is.

PayPal isn't the government.

A phone company isn't the government either, but I am pretty sure Samsung is not allowed to deactivate my phone because they did not like my speech.

Paypal banned me when I was 12 for using a 20% off coupon to buy a pencil from myself for $500. Let me keep the $100 after holding the $500 for 6 months. Best CD ive ever had.

Most of PayPal's horror stories involve them holding funds back for three months after suspension. Or worse, returning funds after dispatch.

>But only PayPal has so many "banned for no reason" horror stories

There is always a reason. The reason this time is probably:

"Gab is a popular gathering place for alt-right activists and white nationalists whose views are unwelcome or banned on other social media platforms. Early members included the right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos and Andrew Anglin, the founder of the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer website. Other well known users have included controversial media personalities Alex Jones and Carl Benjamin."

https://globalnews.ca/news/4604015/gab-pittsburgh-shooting-f...

Or in other words: "Entity believes that discretion can be misused, despite thinking discretion is important"

Which is an extremely reasonable position.

(I've never heard of Gab.)

Well, now you have. It's white supremacist Twitter.

Sounds like a good thing to ban, but I'm still wary of the exact method. ('we can ban anyone' clauses, and the idea of generic payment providers being the arbiters)

That's like saying Twitter is a female-supremacist Gab. There sure are many open sexists who hate men on Twitter:

https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/octavia-sheepshanks/feminis...

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/ny-times-journalist...

Maybe the short format lends itself to people posting dumb, thought-free comments.

>Maybe the short format lends itself to people posting dumb, thought-free comments.

It doesn't just lend itself, it exists for that express purpose.

The problem is people using Twitter as a primary venue for discourse which need more context or nuance than the platform allows.

That's just a catch-all for "our house, our rules". Legal authority aside, it's political warfare and nothing more.

That's pretty dismissive and combative. From a neutral perspective, it looks like one of the intrinsic characteristics of Gab is that it is host to more hateful expression than other platforms. Can you give something in the way of an explanation as to why you're so confident that can't be the real reason?

Did Gab pick the hate groups, or did the hate groups pick Gab? What if you created a platform for expression, and it was infiltrated by a certain type of audience that's generally repulsive. Should we sink your project?

Surely this argument is beneath you. Infiltrated? So it's unwanted by you? What efforts are you making to prevent it? Pretty easy to demonstrate that you won't tolerate that behavior. Gab has never done anything remotely suggesting these are unwanted accounts tarnishing their good name.

Gab is just a clone of Twitter. I might well agree that Twitter-type services are more prone to "hateful expression" than longer form writing, but given the relative sizes of Twitter and Gab you can certainly find far more hate on Twitter. And no, Twitter certainly don't crack down on it systematically, not when it's the kind of hate fashionable on the west coast.

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