Our descendants are going to be seriously confused by our practice of limiting or taking away people's ability to earn money because they publicly used a wrong word. Or so I hope, at least.
And here we are.
The problem is if free speech is effectively banned from the internet due to the internet being controlled by a handful of private companies, do we still have free speech?
Yes, these are all private companies. In fact someone already tried to create an alternative Patreon (called Hatreon, iirc) that was shut down by Visa. Allowing censorship by private companies doesn't work if private companies control who gets to exist on the internet.
What happens if I try to exercise my speech by selling little racist caricature dolls? Walmart, Target, KMart and 7-11 would refuse to stock them. Is my free speech being limited if I'm functionally blocked from the meaningfully accessible parts of our capitalist system?
No, and it would be ludicrous to suggest that grocery stores owe me shelf space.
(Facebook, Reddit and Twitch are a different animal altogether; Comcast, Time Warner, etc. are yet another leve lremoved.)
If people are being arrested for what they are saying then that's censorship and something to be worried about.
If you insert "some" before "unpopular", I'm with you. If you require "all" before "unpopular", then no, I disagree - e.g. people who believe "LGBTQ people should be done away" with, well, that's an "unpopular opinion" that should not be tolerated and, in fact, should be made anathema for anyone to express.
Free speech is a much bigger, and older, idea. And can be seriously threatened by many small changes in our public culture, which need not have anything to do with Washington.
By your standards it's all OK, because it's not the government?
I'd also argue that Patreon isn't obligated at all to help him earn money here. It's not a employee employer relationship here, and they can choose to not to continue to help a person that they deem harmful to other customers.
On a single platform. Nobody's preventing Mr. Benjamin from making money; they're just not allowing him to use one specific platform.
He's welcome to sign up for Hatreon, or to use a payment processor directly.
If true that's disturbing. At a certain point you have to wonder if we're getting close to the spirit of Marsh v. Alabama (e.g the constitutionality of restricting speech in towns that are privately owned by corporations.)
"Jihad Watch" seems a fairly obvious hate site.
I think you realize that this isn't doable.
This
I tend to favor the smallest government possible, because I think private companies tend to do a better work in many areas (not all of them) so I dont like government intervening. But when you have an almost defacto monopoly in certain areas (google, facebook, twitter) banning people who has not broken the law should be illegal, plain and simple.
Then he'll learn a valuable lesson about what is and isn't owed to him in life. Why do you suppose that the world owes everyone a soapbox that dispenses money?
> And are you OK if Twitter bans all left leaning people just because of their beliefs?
I'd be miffed, but that's their right. For example, it seems like Tumblr is making almost that exact mistake, as did Livejournal before them. I'm annoyed by it, but in the end it's their court and all I can do is shake my head, take my ball, and head home.
> But when you have an almost defacto monopoly in certain areas (google, facebook, twitter) banning people who has not broken the law should be illegal, plain and simple.
Patreon isn't on that list, so I assume that your small-government philosophy allows for them to stop supporting Mr. Benjamin and his cohorts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_blacklist
He's asking whether you think it would be reasonable to reinstate this policy, but directed against "racists" instead of communists.
It's the capitalist way: if some private company doesn't want your business, go to another company. If there isn't one, make one. It's all perfectly free-market compatible, and well in keeping with the Internet's ethos of letting anyone set up shop.
And, by the way, although I'm more fond of thinking of Patreon as "just a guy, who sells a service" than as a necessity, there's not so much of an alternative for it either. AFAIK.
Society should chew up and spit out anyone who’s world view is based on hate and racism.