Hacker News Reader

The problem is a lack of other options, driven by the incentives and actions of payment processors like Mastercard. This isn't just theoretical; those who tried switching to Subscribestar after the Sargon incident immediately lost their income again as PayPal cut ties with Subscribestar. The whole "it's a free market, build your own platform" excuse for deplatforming gets increasingly weak as the deplatforming moves upstream towards regulated oligopolies like the international payments system.

One of the reasons why crypto currencies are useful. Same thing happened back when Wikileaks needed donation money and every established platform cut them loose.

Yes, this is showing the problematic aspects of large centralized corporate control on our capability to continue engaging in enlightenment thinking and a healthy democracy.

These bans and suspensions shaft both the creators and the supporters since neither seem to be notified and yet they often charge supporters. It's shady. Corporations that handle peoples' money should be bulletproof.

I would very much prefer if companies just flat out came out and said they don't want someone on their platform instead of trying to twist both their rules and past events to create some kind of coherent narrative. I wouldn't be happier but if I had to choose between being lied to or not being lied to, I prefer honesty.

In the US, it's easy to request card chargebacks if there's been fraud. And charging supporters for banned or frozen creators is arguably fraud. I'm not sure what actually happened with Sargon etc. But according to TFA's OP, Patreon was still collecting money, and hadn't notified either him or his supporters. That's clearly fraud.

Patreon is reknown for political censorship of centrists and the right.

Oh come on, they have a ToS like all other companies. It's not "censorship" to not do business with someone. Also, "the right" here is people like Milo and Lauren Southern who are out in the real world causing harm.

Their CEO Jack Conte a year ago said this exact thing was not covered by their TOS [1]. Patron also admitted that their current TOS text reasonably is worded to only cover what you do on platform. This was not on platform.

Regardless, it is very relevant that a payments platform has arbitrary subjective rules for taking people’s living away. Especially when those reasons are ideological.

[1] https://youtu.be/mujKMPS2FcQ

I think censorship is changing a lot these days as speech moves from being a thing you do with your mouth towards a dialogue you establish throughout online communities. Not saying a company can’t have control, but to full out deny that their control can be equivalent to censorship is letting them off the hook for future problems that will become more and more of an issue for a free thinking society.

Not that our society is all that great at free thinking, but I don’t think we should be setting it up to continue making free thought harder. Even if it comes with some things we don’t like, we need to honor the pursuit of intellectual curiosity and exploration.

It is most definitely censorship. It is not state censorship, and it is not prohibited by the law, but it's definitely an activity targeted to suppress expression of ideas Patreon censors do not like, and it is clearly fitting every reasonable definition of censorship.

The fact that it's not state censorship and thus not aided by state repressive apparatus makes it less abhorrent, but still harmful enough. Especially given that this censorship effort is not solely done by Patreon: most major providers - each of them enjoying near-monopoly in their field - are currently engaged in a concentrated effort to suppress speech they deem offensive. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google, Apple, Patreon, Paypal, Visa, Mastercard - they all take concerted and persistent effort to make views and expressions they dislike unavailable on the Internet, or at least very, very hard to reach.

The effect, while not as drastic as censorship in a totalitarian state - you won't get jailed or shot for sharing a spicy joke, though you could lose your business, your job and your career - is definitely of the same kind and direction as the efforts of any totalitarian state. The goal is to make only conformant expression possible and to make people who do not conform, who want to challenge the reigning dogmas, feel afraid and be excluded from any Internet platform of notice. And until we have viable alternative to censorship platforms, the effects of this would be similar - though, obviously, less drastic - to the effects of state censorship.

But the fact that we are not in North Korea yet is not the reason to continue on the road to this direction - it's a wakeup call to turn around and walk away from it. Including walking away - as much as possible - from censorship platforms.

Again: these are private businesses, free to do business (or not) with whomever they choose, for completely arbitrary reasons.

If you want to fight that, you have to fight capitalism.

Again, you are confusing "something is not currently prohibited by US government" with "something is moral and ethical thing to do". US government is prohibited from exercising content-based censorship by US constitution. This does not mean a private business - which everybody knows is not prohibited by the US constitution from exercising censorship, so you can stop reminding everybody about it and pretending it somehow is a serious argument that somebody didn't hear first 1000 times - is right to produce censorship. The fact that doing this is legal is the lowest bar, but it's not an excuse that magically makes it OK. It just makes whoever does it to avoid jail. Fine, they're not in jail. They should still stop their attempts to institute censorship, even though we can't jail them for it.

> If you want to fight that, you have to fight capitalism.

Bullshit. People regularly fight legal actions by private corporations, and regularly win. Society has hundreds of ways for corporations to stop doing something that is legal but is seen by society as harmful. Capitalism is still alive and well.

Do these platforms have a social responsibility? You're technically correct. What about the people who depend on it who genuinely don't know any better?

milo is a provocateur and lauren can be brazen but neither are causing harm

Although Patreon is an excessively scummy company, there is some evidence that some of these bans were forced by Mastercard and Visa.

In the call with Matt they said that what they did here conform with their corporate values and goals, as they don’t want to allow creators they politically disagree with for branding reasons. If therefore doesn’t matter if this was true in some of the many cases.

There is speculation that Mastercard may have put some pressure on them

I have seen zero actual evidence for MasterCard, and no speculation for Visa, so I would love to see citation for your evidence?

There was Speculation for MC in the JihadWatch banning, but MC has publicly said they were not behind it I believe.

PayPal on the other hand probably is, PayPal has been on a moral Authoritarian left war for over a decade now

See the transcript of Matts conversation with Patreon [1]. They said this was entirely their decision, and they did it because they didn't like Sargons brand whatever that means.

[1] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1U0mQjUA0T5INc_GDkwPJ2mfh...

This.

Mastercard / Visa / Paypal pretty much control the entire system. Wikileaks was "deplatformed" years ago.

Read the transcript [1] of the call between Patreon and Matt, and Patreon said it was entirely their decision. Another rather scummy thing is to act ideologically while obscuring your reasons, reasons you are perfectly capable of expressing in private.

MATT: Are you telling me that this was Patreon’s decision then, or someone pressured you into this?

PATREON: No - this was entirely Patreon’s decision.

MATT: Well then I don’t understand passing the buck off to somebody else.

PATREON: No, I’m not passing the buck off. The thing is we have guidelines, but I’m trying to explain, #1 it is our mission to fund the creative class and obviously some people may not want to be associated.

[1] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1U0mQjUA0T5INc_GDkwPJ2mfh...

Man stifling people who think “the wrong way” is pretty horrifying to me at the moment. I’ve largely separated myself from leftist ideals in the last couple years because, with very little hyperbole, I’ve noticed that the time to be labeled a racist or Hitler is way the hell too small.

Don’t get me wrong - racists are not something I tolerate in my personal life. Not at all. There’s no need for that kind of crap in our society and I’m not going to go down the rabbit hole of trying to change someone’s mind when rationality isn’t the basis of their thinking. But there’s a hell of a lot of grey area between racism and simply thinking about things in a different way. And right now it seems like the freedom to think differently, even if it’s just to come to a valid conclusion instead of believing what you’re told, is under a lot of fire. Somehow a lot of people (or maybe just the noisy people) are all too willing to throw away freedom to enact a totalitarian view of how they think the world should work.

That’s not right. Humans need freedom. And sometimes that means the freedom to make mistakes. The people imposing this censorship aren’t perfect. They aren’t better than the rest of us nor are they more moral. So to me, it’s totally unacceptable that they’ve established themselves as moral chaperones.

"What if we just oppress and persecute minorities a little bit?" is not a valid argument. The truth isn't in the middle, as centrists hopelessly seem to believe.

If you want to fight corporate control over speech, you have to fight against capitalism.

It is not capitalism that restricts speech, it is the religious in social justice that does that through seeking institutional roles and abusing their power in those roles. A tool of favor is to couple that with mobs pretending to be outraged in order to pressure a social justice belief into a corporation.

Our society has a separation between a secular state and religious practice for this purpose, and we must restrict social justice abuses using those tools.

See Areo article here for a more in depth argument for this: https://areomagazine.com/2018/12/18/postmodern-religion-and-...

I wonder if this has to do with the Kushners (Thrive Capital) leading their latest funding round

More likely this is what happens when you create a trust and safety department run by ideologues that censor according to some elusive concept of “hate speech”. Who defines hate? Ideologues should at least not

Maybe it just has to do with the fact that as a company heavily involved in payment processing they’d be crazy to not be exceedingly careful about who they work with?

Why would this have anything to do with ideology?

Joe Rohan covered this well [1]. What Sargon is supposedly being banned for according to patreon is using the n-word against Nazis that had been attacking him for a while. Patreon said context didn’t matter and that they didn’t like his “brand” whatever that means. He didn’t say this on patreon or even his own YouTube channel, and let’s remember again he used the language of literal Nazis against them.

Supposedly context doesn’t matter if you violate social justice beliefs, because somehow sharing the platform with someone that does wrongthink also taints you. It is a very dangerous way of thinking and we should not tolerate it from tech platforms.

[1] https://youtu.be/2wsQPFyZghc

Context doesnt matter if you risk bringing negative publicity to Patreon, which will directly affect their payment processing rates.

We are here talking about some hypothetical negative publicity. The outrage about what Sargon said is rather contrived and I suspect most of it is an act.

It just doesn't make sense for patreon to care about whether this outrage is contrived or not, any negative publicity over their customers could hurt their margins a lot.

Payment processing is hard. I'm not saying it should be so, but Patreon isn't to blame for that.

More than what the outrage over the censorship of other viewpoints are? To me what they are doing seems more like an act of faith in social justice that is most likely really bad for their business

I rather doubt that outrage over Patreon banning users to keep their payment processors happy would hurt their relationship with said payment processors.

In the call with Matt Christiansen they said this was entirely their decision.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1U0mQjUA0T5INc_GDkwPJ2mfh...

To anybody doubting the absurdity we're talking about here: These people (https://twitter.com/RevLeftRadio) still have an active patreon.

Why is that so absurd? They have a strong left-wing viewpoint, heavy on solidarity and anti-capitalist/anti-fascist thought.

I see no racism not calling for enforced monogamy or the taking of rights away from trans people or minorities, or anything of the sort.

I see abundant racism and sexism on patreon of the kind popular of the American left.

Let me rephrase that: You see a lot of calling-out of reprehensible behavior perpetrated by white men.

That's a good thing, that kind of stuff should be called out.

There is no excuse for leftist racism, sexism and anti semitism.

Well aside from implying that they want people to become violent: https://twitter.com/RevLeftRadio/status/909456034527371264

They also openly call for violence, including executions, of people that they don't like (although those tweets seem to have been deleted now): https://www.redstate.com/brandon_morse/2018/12/13/patreon-al...

(Please excuse that source, like I said they have deleted the most offensive tweets recently. Originally this was part of a discussion surrounding Sam Harris leaving patreon, which is where I read about it.)

Why would the Kushners be stifling right-wing voices?