That incident was the first time I've ever taken the need for alternative payment processors very seriously.
I’m not into the kink which caused it (and I won’t repeat it here) but that left a bad taste in my mouth. IMO, people should be free to discuss what they’re into, even when it’s something much more harmful than the kink involved.
1: So that's what? Anything from deep charcoal black to a subtle off-white?
(I work in payments)
example: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/07/caving-government-pres...
Apple will be piggybacking off of MasterCard's network.
Patreon has also banned various leftist sites for things like doxxing and posting instructions on how to commit terrorism, but that doesn't get as much attention for some reason.
For left leaning people it takes doxxing and instructions on how to commit acts of mass violence to get banned.
For the opposite ends of the political spectrum people have been banned for months-old videos - not even on a channel that the banned person runs - in which someone uses a swear word to tell the alt-right that they "are acting like n_____s" (which I interpreted as a deliberate word choice to emphasize irony that the alt-right is behaving how they often portray and see African Americans. Sargon's explanation is roughly similar). Meanwhile there are plenty of people who use the same slur regularly, some even in the usernames of their social media profiles. There is zero doubt in my mind that Patreon decided to ban Sargon on the basis of his political views first, then searched for something to justify the ban.
These are hardly the same situations.
It doesnt take that. But the far-left rarely insults people with racial slurs.
No, they prefer to use words like nazi, facist *phobe, which most likely won't get anyone banned, expect the target of those insults
Its just that coorporations are far more scared of beeing associated with the right, than the left.
Legally speaking you're not allowed to insult anyone, wether as a n-word, nor as a nazi
This is absolutely false, at least in the US where Patreon is based. Out of curiosity where did you get the idea that insults are illegal (assuming you're talking about the Unites States)?
Calling someone a nazi when you cannot proof that they do indeed follow that ideology would also be slander/libel.
Someone tried to sue for calling someone a Nazi but lost [1]. In this case the defendant claimed to have been presenting a hypothetical. I have not been able to find a successful defamation case due to someone being called a Nazi in the US. Not to mention it wouldn't affect calling a black person a n____r because such a statement is not factually incorrect (as the slur is a derogatory term for a black person).
1. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.thewrap.com/james-woods-bea...
https://twitter.com/realsexycyborg/status/107369726493205299...
> I am not alt right, I am not a nazi. I've been on @SubscribeStar since @Vice terminated my @Patreon account in May. I haven't even recovered from that hit to my income. I am tired of being acceptable collateral damage in your culture wars. You sacrifice your livelihood- not mine.
But all that being said, it's all irrelevant. Let's say he said the n-word maliciously and was a racist, is it the role of MasterCard to prevent that person from being able to pay for a burrito? To get a paycheck from their legal employment? Why can't the expectation be that MasterCard is neutral up until the point of legality? There is a really bad authoritarian trend on the left wing to go after absolutely every neutral cog in the machine. If Reddit doesn't ban /r/The_Donald, Reddit is right wing. If Twitter doesn't ban TERFs, Twitter is right wing. Now payments? Are we going to get mad at the government for letting Been Shapiro drive on their neutral roads?
Outside of a standard set of specific reasons for which it is agreed to be illegal to refuse business (race, sex, orientation etc..), no business is supposed to be able to be compelled -by the government- to associate or transact with another. Instead, boycotts are used by the public themselves (rather than via government strongarming) or by company-to-company action to persuade companies to adjust their behaviour to meet expectations of what is ethically appropriate.
In arrangement, the expectation is not that companies are 'neutral' but that they are sufficiently moderated by public will. This freedom not-to-transact is what allows things such as boycotts of Apartheid South Africa, boycotts of companies that abuse their workers or run sweatshops etc.
There are plenty of ways to rearrange things outside of a Capitalist model, but once you decide to have Capitalism but 'prevent boycotting on political grounds' you're basically suggesting that Capitalism ought to be stripped of one of its extremely few mechanisms for ethical feedback. The implications of that ought to scare you.
This is the big problem with both the massive scale of certain businesses, their extensive interweaving with government, and of course monopolization.
What I'm asking is if we as a public really want our payment processors to be making these moral judgements? That doesn't mean I think they should be compelled to do anything, but I certainly think it's cause for concern, and call for an alternative that IS willing to behave as a neutral party. I don't want the noise of what is effectively a pipe to be making arbitrary political judgements when deciding what is allowed to pass through.
Now, publicly funded banks, that's a different question. I absolutely expect neutrality within what is legal from our government institutions.
If this action was completely unprompted, sure, but I think we're talking about payment processors choosing not to associate with people who have already been the subject of boycotts on their previous platform.
A better example would be WikiLeaks which enjoyed a fair amount of public support at the time Visa etc declined to process their payments, as we have reasons to suspect that the pressure on Visa to do this may have been from the U.S. Government.
By contrast, there have already been numerous public protests against people hosted on the SubscribeStar platform.
I'm pretty sure that if you're in position of quasi-monopoly, it should be illegal
See: AT&T after "we" did, Microsoft after "we" didn't.
Apparently we do, otherwise they wouldn’t be doing it.
Postal money orders already exists, and are exactly as expensive and inconvenient as you would expect.
The actual problem is KYC laws that require payment processors to do the job of the police and refuse service to customers under purposely vague corporate policies without due process, instead of having the police do that job and only have payment processing service denied with a court order and an opportunity to contest it under the law.
What is awful is that I expect it to be inconvenient and awful in the US because there is this idea that anything the government does will inevitably be bad and then there are multiple political parties that try their hardest to make that idea come true when they get elected.
There's no reason for the system to not work in the US other than people trying to sabotage it to the detriment of large parts of the population so their personal tax burden is lower since they don't believe they ever will need the service.
The EU in general doesn't provide government services, the UK does, France does.
When you're already the size of a state, there are basically no more economies of scale to be had by doing something at the size of a union of states. Your fixed costs are already being amortized over something like a million people or more, so the variable costs already dominate and spreading the fixed costs over even more people is past the point of diminishing returns.
But it's not past the point of expanding overhead. So suppose you want to do this in the US -- have the Post Office compete with Mastercard. You propose the bill.
The banks hate it because it's them you're competing with, they have billions of dollars, but more importantly they're a major industry in some states (e.g. New York) which have large numbers of legislators. So they not only use those votes against your bill, they trade their legislators' votes on other bills to get more votes against your bill. Moreover, their legislators are the ones who care most about things like finance, so guess who is on the finance committee.
Then you have states like Virginia where the major industry is defense. They want to destroy privacy protections, because you can't get a lucrative government contract for hoovering up and data mining financial data if you're not allowed to hoover up and data mine financial data. Guess who is on the committees related to that sort of thing. And New York is all for that -- data mining financial data for private purposes is lucrative too, and that amendment also makes it harder to pass the bill they don't like.
Then you have states where the government itself is a major employer, and what they want is more government jobs for their people. So they don't want your program to be efficient, they want it to be labor intensive, which is the opposite. But then it costs more, charges higher fees, requires the users to fill out more forms to use it etc. You may also see private companies looking for the same thing, because they then sell a solution to it, as with Intuit opposing tax simplification.
And so it goes down the line, at each stage making the program worse and harder to pass, until it either dies in committee somewhere or gets passed as some horrifying abomination that makes things worse rather than better.
This isn't some individual proposing to make the bill worse on purpose to demonstrate the ineffectiveness of government, it's a structural issue that produces that outcome systemically.
Now you expect I'm going to suggest having the individual states do it. There are some states that aren't full of big banks or spooks or government bureaucrats, all we need is for one of them to do it. Which would work if they weren't subject to the same problematic federal laws as private enterprise is, created by the same problematic process, which is the reason the market isn't already taking care of this.
In order for the states to do things better, first the feds would have to stop standing on their feet.
Imagine if the post office was getting transaction fees instead of banks.
Since then I've seen post office banking as a way for getting poorer people out from under the thumb of exploitative banks, credit card companies, and check cashing places. Consider as well why should the government give a cut of EBT's cards and unemployment transactions.
So I went and looked up their payment options. And sure enough, they have a page on that. Which has the following notice:
"In order to stay compliant with our strategic credit card processing partners' policies and due to recently tightened regulations on the cryptocurrency circulation for the US-based companies, we are going to halt all support for cryptocurrency payments on this site for the time being."
What is this all about? Are they saying that payment processors will refuse to work with organizations that accept cryptocurrency? But then how e.g. Coinbase works with credit cards?
Cryptocurrencies accomplish nothing that wasn't already possible before, usually faster, cheaper and safer. Just because someone uses an alternative doesn't mean it's solving a problem, and in this case it's just creating more issues.
Generally there seems to be lots of people who don't use cryptocurrencies and think that they don't solve any problems - OK whatever, don't use them, but there are loads of people using cryptocurrencies for whatever and your opinions are not objective measure on their value.
Bitcoin allows people in Venezuela to avoid wealth confiscation on the borders, either when they are running away or when they are sending money back home to family.
Bitcoin allows people in Iran to transact with outer world.
Bitcoin allows people in India to keep their wealth in face of demonetization.
There are many problems that Bitcoin solves for real people and real companies every day.
Just because you aren't one of them, doesn't mean they don't exists.
AML = Anti-Money Laundering
(for those that are not in the industry :-))
We really need something better.