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Comment by comex | Hacker News Reader

No need to jump to the idea of compulsion. If there were an established social norm that "platform platforms" should make an active attempt to be viewpoint-neutral, chances are that enough of them would voluntarily follow that norm to allow platforms like Gab to continue operating. If the norm isn't established, well, good luck passing a law to force anyone to follow it. Right now, the trend seems to be against such a norm.

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Why should "platform platforms" establish a norm attempting to actively appear "viewpoint neutral"?

"come a little closer mouse so that I may better catch you and eat you..."

Why on earth should society bend over backwards to aid spoiled deliberate attention-seekers when there are 7 billion other people who are actually trying to resolve problems that need our actual attention.

These "malingerers" are using up valuable medical staff's time they could be spending upon actually ill patients!

I'm not sure what you mean about medical staff. I'm not suggesting that anyone bend over backwards to aid organizations like Gab, merely that they don't go out of their way to ban them merely because they don't like them. For example, in the case of Stripe and PayPal, there doesn't seem to be any suggestion that Gab falls under any of the normal categories that would cause a financial services platform to ban a merchant – e.g. suspicion of fraud or money laundering, high chargeback rates, high rates of fraud among people giving money, anything like that.

And - how or why would I care that stripe processed infowars transactions, unless I was actually in the process of buying something from infowars?

The issue isn't whether you in particular care or not.

The issue, as I'm reading the parent comment, is that it's beginning to appear that no one is willing to stand up and say "look, it's not that I support this or that view, it's just that, well, if people are going to spout nonsense it might as well be here where can all observe them", because doing so would be so against current social normal it would be irresponsible.

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