Boycotting Amazon and Paypal | Hacker News Reader

Boycotting Amazon and Paypal

olabini.com

Enough already... If you all want to rally behind Wikileaks, go for it. But there's no need to submit so many articles, none of which provide any new information.

Agreed. This teeters on slacktivism.

Boycotting Amazon is completely boneheaded. They have every right to not host Wikileaks content. Regardless of whether this was the result of government pressure or not is moot.

Well, I shouldn't say "boneheaded." You have every right to refuse to buy things from Amazon. I just think expressing moral outrage because they refuse to host content is silly.

>I just think expressing moral outrage because they refuse to host content is silly.

Really?

i'm confused by this attitude.

Amazon has done something a lot of people disagree with. why do you think it's silly to react to that?

Because there's just as big a group on the other side of the fence. The question really comes down to "why didn't Amazon go to bat for my beliefs?", and that does appear to be a silly question.

I think this whole thing is blown way out of proportion. As a business, Amazon was going to get a boycott either way - either from the pro-WikiLeaks side for failing to host WikiLeaks, or the anti-WikiLeaks side for doing the opposite.

It seems silly to use a business as a battleground of ideologies, especially when as far as anyone knows Amazon acted out of self preservation, not political prejudice.

[edit] And for God's sake, can we stop posting about this already unless something actually happens? The level of WikiLeaks moral outrage posts that don't shed any new light on anything is rivaling Reddit. With Reddit at least I can filter stories out for certain keywords, please don't make me do the same to HN. We've already discussed the known information to death, to keep hammering at this dead horse on a forum that is highly liberal and has mostly-aligned opinions on a subject is known as a circlejerk.

HN signal-to-noise ratio--;

Surely any kind meaningful of dissemination of free speech in the modern world is going to involve business in some way, and in the US, businesses are recognized as legal persons. How can their actions be considered neutral?

if there's really a big group on the other side of the fence, they should be organizing pro-Amazon and pro-Paypal actions

Amazon was in a situation where they had to take a political action. why is it surprising or wrong that they now need to face the consequences?

For me, a person not in the Interpol's wanted list, both Amazon and PayPal work perfectly.

Boycott wikileaks. Posting classified government documents is going too far. Im all for whistleblowing, but you can't expect to share private government documents that potentially put Americans in danger and expect no consequences.

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