Stripe bans Trump campaign

They might be the latter, but I wouldn't consider it obvious. Regarding social media, we've gotten to the point where even US Visa applications ask for social media handles (and I understand they consider it as a negative datum if you don't provide one). And we're also at the point where some companies won't provide you with respectable service unless you @ them on social media. Regarding payment platforms, generally people expect them to be quite neutral, since getting locked out of the financial system is not exactly going to lead to a great life in the modern digital economy.

I don't know at what point these cross into "utility" territory, and I'm willing to entertain the idea that they might never do so, but I find it quite debatable and very much not clear.

(Note: None of this is to opine on the reactions to this particular incident. Just commenting on the more general idea.)

I've seen a lot of comments that act authoritative about the legal consequences, but heavily editorialized to say "the government shouldn't".

I'm not going to state my personal stance, because it's complicated and frankly, I haven't put enough thought into it to be comfortable presenting it. But, you (the reader) should be willing to forgo your kneejerk reaction (if you have one) and think about the consequences of what you're proposing when discussing changing the status quo and desired legislature to "solve" these issues.

Classes that are protected now, were not protected at some point.

I think the discussion revolves not around whether political affiliation is a protected class, but whether it should be, in a sense- whether what is going on is good or bad for society, not whether or not it is illegal.

You are entitled to believe that it is good, of course.

FYI, political affiliation is protected from discrimination in CA, NY, and DC.

https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/can-employers-discri...

For all intents and purposes, freedom of speech has flatlined in America. What will bring it back?

Pretty sure it is in California.

Also, how far do we go with this reasoning? Stripe and PayPal refuse service so they're supposed to "Go build their own" (it costs billions to create a new service like stripe or PayPal that can compare). AWS shut you down? Build your own data center... (Again, costs millions or billions). What if next Intel or AMD decides to not sell you processors? Go build your own fab and develop your own hardware? What if the silicon miners won't sell you silicon, are you now supposed to go build your own mine?

The issue isn't that companies have a right to do it, it's that there are no viables alternatives to these large duopolies, and that "creating your own" is not an alternative.

What happens if the party in power next decides to attack religious organizations who congregate during that pandemic with the same type of concerted de-platforming? What if it's people who advocate against raising taxes who are next as deemed "morally corrupt"?

It's not hard to imagine this type of anti competitive, semi-concerted effort to de platform a new company being targeted at other things in the future. We need laws to catch up to our modern society and either break up the monopolies or put a lot more protections around the types of discrimination that are illegal, which should include political affiliation (this is law in California for employment discrimination so it's not that far fetched of an idea).

Perhaps these bans are happening not because of political affiliation but due to the messages these particular people (e.g., Trump) are espousing.

Parler go banned because it's full of message calling for (e.g.) Mike Pence to be hanged and other such things, and Parler isn't / can't do much about it, and its infrastructure providers (AWS, app stores) do not want any part of it per their ToS.

No one has cut off Mitch McConnell because he hasn't been calling forth angry mobs to storm Congress (or the White House).

Twitter and Stripe are acting in coordination - literally conspiring - with every other big tech company to take a specific action. When they do that they're acting as an illegal cartel and must be prosecuted accordingly. This is the kind of coordinated cartel behavior that banana republics and third world countries have that behave exactly like these companies are and do so out in the open (and always with the political support of the group with the most power, to target their foes). We're supposed to have anti-trust laws to deal with conspiring mega corporations.

Back in the day, you had to rack your own servers in your own data centers and manage them yourself. Had any of these 'free speech' services spent any time considering how reliant they were on 3rd party services, they should never have engaged those companies in the first place.

There was a day when you had to build your own servers to host your own websites. Not that long ago, imo.

Just FYI, some countries have made it a protected class, e.g.: https://www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/1993/0082/latest/... (see 21(1)(j))

The ongoing purge -- would it not be seen as treason, as an act to in fact subvert/weaken a position of POTUS and therefore directly destabilize the US government?

This is a distraction. Political speech enjoys the highest level of protection in the US, political speech is one of the primary motivators behind the existence of constitutionally protected speech in the US.

These tech giants have made themselves into a lattice on which modern society attaches itself, and their pervasiveness will only continue to grow in 21st century America. We risk them being in bed with government. And when nominally private, major industry is aligned with government to effect political ends, there's a word for that, and we've seen that before.

Private companies deciding not to service the head of the executive seems to be nearly the opposite of that, unless I understood this wrongly (which is entirely possible). Think of a newspaper (=private entity) decides to boycott a president and not write anything about him. Wouldn't it be the polar opposite of free speech if the president then had the power to force them to write about him?

I get that a payment service is not the same as a newspaper, but it is still a private entity.

"Stop The Steal" is just another flavor of conflating 1st amendment "freedom of speech" protections with a "RIGHT" to be on some platform or another, or to talk at some venue or another.

I think the other important factor here is we are in a very vulnerable moment right now because we are in the midst of a transition of power. It takes time to transfer the apparatus and operations of state, and during this time there is a power vacuum that can be taken advantage of by adversaries foreign and domestic. Every state throughout history has struggled in these times.

The failure to secure the Capitol was in no small part due to how the President has run the state in the waning months of his term. His cabinet and administration are running a skeleton crew, he's acting erratically, and he's making false claims about election results and inciting crowds in a bid to stay in power. Whether one supports his policies or not, it should be abundantly clear right now that his actions and rhetoric put the country in further danger during this vulnerable time, and that perhaps he need not have access to platforms that make this easier and more convenient. It should be hard to dismantle the state, to whip people into a frenzy, to cause the damage that has been caused.

1) The most radicalized are by Q. Which itself is a disinformation campaign, contributed to by government entities.

2) Bernie sanders brags about occupying government buildings. Would he be held to the same standard? OAC praised BLM protesters marching on the White House a few months ago, with Antifa trying to breach police lines and storm the White House. Should we throw her in jail for sedition. How about Pelosi that asked the army to ignore orders from Trump.

The US might be a democracy. But just because you can vote, does not mean you have any meaningful amount of power. The powerful cabal of corrupt politicians, and their rich backers, they have power. And they have been there for a very long time. They are almost impossible to displace. This breach shook them, because it was common, everyday people that did this. The same people that have had their livelihood destroyed, and have been hurt by all the COVID rules, rioting, trade deals with foreign countries, and so on.

Trump is great for democracy. At every turn he exposes the hypocrisy of the current system. He needles them, and each time they over react. Exposing all their flaws. The amount of backstabbing he gets just from the Republican party, is waking up millions of people.

Thanks to him, we found out how convoluted and non transparent the election process is. How biased the media is. How the Supreme court cowers to political pressure. And now how big tech is working in collusion.

All things that a democratic movement can help to fix.

This. Violence, intimidation and death are the ultimate forms of censorship. Much more so than having to switch your digital payment processor or having to self-host your blog or social media app.

Germany decided after WWII that it was better to mass-censor Naziism than it was to let Nazis freely organize or spread their ideas again. It's not that Germany doesn't like free speech, it's that Naziism and free speech are diametrically opposed and forced to make a choice, they choose free speech.

It seems like a contradiction where censorship promotes free speech, but it all depends on your timeline. In the short term banning Nazis limits free speech, in the long run banning Nazis increases free speech.

When we give violent groups space to grow and organize, we're more anti-free speech than we realize because the capital riots are the inevitable arc (and only the opening act) for very small groups to violently oppress large numbers of peaceful citizens who love democracy.

The right and moral thing to do was to give the duly elected President latitude until it was massive in scope and objectively false. In my mind, that didn’t happen until last month when he continued to claim the election was stolen after the rejection of his lawsuits.

Let me ask for a quick accounting here - what is the evidence for this? My understanding is 100% of the gun deaths were from guns in the hands of law enforcement officers who were perfectly capable of defending themselves when pushed. There are a bunch of instantly iconic photos [0] with basically no weapons in the hands of protestors. They clearly didn't plan on breaching the Capitol or they'd have realised that they were all about to go to jail forever.

This is a not a mob out for literal blood.

[0] https://edition.cnn.com/2021/01/07/us/capitol-mob-deaths/ind...

This is not about removing "hate". This is about removing political opposition.

The WalkAway campaign's FB page was removed, despite no violent content.

The Articles of Unity project has been deplatformed from Twitter (and I believe FB) for a while with no justification and absolutely no hateful content whatsoever.

Yes, there are many high-profile targets that seem easy to justify, but a much larger swath of those affected are completely unjustifiable.

But I get the sense people are talking past each other to a degree because there are levels to this.

It goes beyond trying to figure out what the hell happened at the capitol and figuring out how best to prevent it in the future, while maintaining a healthy non-repressive society.

One issue is that these private businesses have become something close to, if not de facto public utilities/infrastructure.

If you ask around you can learn that this "private business overreach" of "big brother" drawing the bounds of "permissible free speech" has actually been going on for some time.

The "private business overreach" part of the story is getting more attention because it has been directed at the most visible person on the planet. Or, was the most visible until Twitter et al, performed "private business overreach" reducing his visibility considerably and simultaneously getting people's attention and raising questions about the nature of power, communication, etc. in the current age.

Another issue is that the "rules" for who and what gets booted and censored from these realms by an always shifting, opaque, and selectively enforced set of rules is to a statistically significant degree clearly bunched in certain areas of the ideological matrix. Are the actors in these areas of the matrix just more prone to breaking the rules or are "the rules" whatever they are today, selectively and over-zealously enforced in order to repress certain ideas and perspectives?

Is there some objective standard against high level US politicians doing things that could be interpreted as inciting, instigating, or glorifying violence?

How about Kamala Harriss posting a bail fund for violent rioters and criminals this past summer, wouldn't that fall squarely over the line of inciting, or instigating, or glorifying violence?

Curiously, crickets around that one...

> just tells me that things really went too far and should have been shut down much sooner.

So is this advocating for enforcement of "pre-crime?" We should keep an eye out for people saying things we don't like then repress their ability to act in the digital age, to prevent them from committing a future crime we have projected onto them?

> The fact that all these institutions just allowed this horrible hateful speech for four years, in the name of free speech etc, despite all the harassment, harm (mental and otherwise) it caused to so many people in America actually emboldened so many to the extent that now that they crossed this invisible line, they can't even really understand the ramifications of what happened. That what gets me.

Hate is an emotion, emotions are subjective. There is no clear objective measure of what is "hateful speech." "Speech" is a noun, an objective thing. Free speech, as in, as little restrictions on speech as are feasible was a great insight by America's founding fathers as to what would contribute to a healthy, dynamic, non-repressive society. Turns out they were right about a lot of things.

Americans today have to be adults and understand that content of speech and someone's actions are different things. The speech of someone like Trump is actually much closer to being an action. But you can't just start repressing speech no matter how "hateful" unfortunately. How about contributing with Love wherever you see hate?

> a few feet away from irreversibly staining American history

Sometimes I think back to another time in the recent past when there was an even more clear and present danger to members of the highest level of the federal govt. I think back in a shocked disbelief of "Holy cow... what if some large fraction of the Congress was murdered in one day?"

Does anybody even remember that?! It was just a couple years ago, multiple shots were fired at Congressmen at a baseball game. It's shocking to think what could have been then.

But it just seems to have dropped off the radar. I wonder why there wasn't a crackdown then on speech about things like Rachel Maddow/NYT/Media Establishment type conspiracies, or even any interest in a public airing of the attacker's motivations.

Seeing a dozen news articles the best argument seems to be that the mention of not attending the inauguration was a call for violence. I don't buy it.

Even if Facebook, Twitter, etc, had banned all these platforms and politicians, I'm confident people still would have come out for the protest. Taking away people's ability to organize on mainstream platforms didn't stop the HK protestors from organizing against the CCP. The lack of online platforms didn't stop the Color Revolutions in Eastern Europe. Even the Arab Spring, while often attributed to Twitter, happened in the face of mass censorship and Internet shutdowns.

IMHO the decisions to de-platform these groups will do nothing to put a dent in their political ideology, and will only serve to throw gasoline on the fire at a contentious period where many millions of people feel like they don't have a voice. And it's likely that peaceful discourse and political thought will be wiped out as collateral damage as a result of the decisions these companies are making.

I think there is a serious mental health crisis in the US right now, and that the majority of Trump supporters are mentally incapable of acknowledging that they have been lied too, taken advantage of, and as a result are on the wrong side of history.

I have been having meaningful conversations with my family about this, and I feel like I am starting to break through.

Unfortunately I just don't have the emotional bandwidth to coddle the bullshit I see people posting these days in defence of this attempted coup and the resulting murders.

Perhaps a better person than me can be civil with these people, but I just don't give a fuck anymore.

The prevailing idea on HN is however “let’s have no regulation than bad regulation”... Guys, there’s such thing as good regulation.

Maybe this is a HN bubble, the vast majority of Americans wouldn't be able to tell you what Snowden even specifically leaked...or rather, the journalists leaked on his and our behalf.

Trump is not the leader of the free world any longer. He's clearly on the way out, and he invited violence while the door was closing. Even the weakened GOP must admit he is a wannabe dictator, and his rhetoric led to 5 deaths, nevermind untold thousands to pandemic.

So no, I think there is not much slippery slope implication to deplatforming insane people like Trump, Alex Jones, KKK members, Nazis, terrorists, etc. Why should these people retain the privilege of posting harmful and murderous content on a company's website? Where in the constitution is tweeting an enshrined right?

Most of the public was pro-Snowden, especially the tech community. Telegram rose like a rocketship as a result of concerns over NSA backdoors.

It's fairly clear where these companies are drawing a line, and for most people like me, it's a perfectly acceptable line. Being the cause of actual violence and death means you get to be banned. Fairly clear?

The more murky question is people who think all cake shops should serve gay weddings but twitter should also be allowed to ban trump. Tough call and nuance involved there, but I doubt there's much ambiguity separating where one stands on Snowden's revalations and these recent bans

This is … not even remotely how I remember that period, more of a sense of outrage and companies rushing to encrypt internal connections and deploy PFS.

> If the leader of the free world can be banned from all social media and co, who are based in the very same nation, and who are monopolies, then what hope is there for the rest of us?

This isn’t a great fit: Trump isn’t being banned for being a conservative or talking policies, but for inciting violence which lead to a deadly mob. If all that happens are companies enforcing their terms of service against violence or hate speech evenly, that bothers me a lot less — especially since in this case it’s treating everyone consistently rather than singling him out for special treatment.

Wow, that's some impressive revisionist history, unfortunately for you its possible for us to actually look back in time and see exactly what was said.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5849932

1. "leader of the free world" is an incredibly arrogant statement.

2. He can be banned for the same reason that the rest of us can: inciting violence. I'd argue that having equal rules for everyone (or even _stricter_ ones for politicians) is good and healthy. The banning of people inciting violence gives me hope.

Actually, the problem is that those with power can get away with this but others can’t.

Think five minutes into the future if you will where there are no consequences if you have enough political power. Some day that might be a socialist or a communist or a white nationalist or a fascist encouraging an armed group to intimidate the legislature. Will we encourage companies to continue to do business with them as well? Or do we specifically grant Republicans and Democrats the privilege to abuse the power of their office?

Imagine Jamal from down the road hammering his neighbors with lies about an election and then organizing a march into the capital that beats a police officer to death with the goal of killing the VP of the US. Jamal had no status, no privilege, no financial resources and no one to pardon him. No one is worried about Jamal or his supporters ever attaining political power and seeking revenge because they have no connections, no wealth and no access to the halls of power. No communities are “healed” by not prosecuting Jamal, so he ends up going to jail for a long time. On the flip side, Stripe has never heard of Jamal so he gets to keep his preferred payment processor after he’s released from prison. Meanwhile Trump who’s been pardoned and is living under Secret Service detail at Mar a Lago is still somehow “not as equal” as Jamal because Trump is only able to make money online through other payment processors but not his preferred Stripe gateway.

Wtf? Nobody said anything of the sort, and if they did they would have been downvoted to the maximum. This is just totally absurd revisionist, we were only five years removed from the W Bush administration, which committed legitimate war crimes and left office with a 22% approval rating.

I'm sure anybody that's been censored, dehumanized, and removed from society by an evil regime has been comforted by the fact that the people doing it think it's fine to do it, or because the people doing it are doing it legally. Those facts don't make it right ...

Without an uncensorable currency, any political adversary -- especially an incumbent -- can just coerce payment processors into blocking payments to their opponents through threats of imprisonment or violence against a handful of executives.

Right now, we haven't heard from ISPs. The entire suite of services that are controlled by the monopoly FANGs can be recreated, including clouds and cloud-fronts.

If that line is crossed as well then we'll have a modern society entirely dependent on information infrastructure that is controlled by a handful of companies with pedigree rooted firmly in the defense and intelligence sectors. You can call that whatever you please, but it will not be pleasant.

[p.s. I vote Green.]

If you have a colluding oligopoly in something crucial to do business such as payments or communication, where it's difficult to switch due to network effects, being banned by them is like being banned by government.

So they did, but the totalitarians were not satisfied, so then they banned them from app stores users used to connect and find the new service... crying Build your own service it is a private company

So they did, but the totalitarian were not satisfied so they banned them from the network infrastructure used to connect them to the service... crying build your own network infrastructure it is private company

So they did, but the totalitarians were not satisfied so they banned from the payment services used to generate revenue for the service... crying build your own payment service it is private company

So they did, but totalitarians were still not satisfied, still hiding behind the "but its a private company" the totalitarians continue to demand anyone that disagrees with them be banned from all services everywhere all the while screaming that they are not in fact totalitarian, no they are upholding freedom for all...

see in 1984 war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength

does this make you reconsider at all?

https://stripe.com/blog/why-some-businesses-arent-allowed

It's a super common practice to deny some customers for basically all financial services companies.

There’s absolutely nothing preventing the Trump campaign from using a different payment processor.

It would be a different matter if Visa and MasterCard had blocked them.

Not that I would hold my breathe waiting for the Department of Justice to press charges.

But private companies do not actually have the right to coordinate takedowns of other companies.

No one is removing groups that say taxes should be lower. They are distancing them selves from a groups whose core policy is now attempt to violently overthrow the government because they lost an election. If I started discussing on this site how to kill government officials, I'd be banned pretty quick.

First off, I don't see why, philosophically, the owner of a service shouldn't be allowed to decide, who he wants to do business with. And despite I do remember some stories when the same people who are cheering for Trump to get banned everywhere were defending, quite hypocritically, the opposite point of view, it really wasn't something new and outrageous, even back then, especially when dealing with all these internet-machines. We are long used to the fact, that getting banned on some internet forum is ok and you generally don't have the real option to appeal. The host is the host, and he bans whoever he wants. And while sometimes it may be much much more than a little inconvenience for the person getting banned, people never really cared, because it's rare enough for the consequences of it to be really tragic for people to feel empathetic: society doesn't give a fuck about the problems of an individual unless enough people fear the same might happen to them.

Second, it's never been a secret, where Silicon Valley (HN folks included) is leaning politically. So let's not pretend there are some justifications why they had to do all this shit to Trump for some greater good. The truth is, the entities involved just hate the guy, pretty much everyone in big tech except for Thiel was donating generously to his opponents. So no big surprise here either.

But the first thing that was really special about Trump being bullied by Twitter (quite a while ago) is that this was not some random guy, it was the acting president of a country that hosts Twitter, elected by (more or less) half of the country (on both occasions). So, while (arguably) playing by the rules, Twitter was basically showing that their opinion was more important, than the opinion of the guy half of their the country voted for. And there wasn't some other platform which he could move to, Twitter is Twitter and the rest is, well, the rest. So this was the first point.

Fast forward to now, Trump being banned from everywhere and apps that refuse to ban Trump being banned from Amazon/Apple Store/Google Play themselves, we arrive to the second point: things look a little differently, when there are like 3 major service providers that are supposedly competing with each other, and if they all agree that you're a person non-grata, you are fucked. Even if the half of the country supports you, it's nothing. What really matters that 10 guys on top of these big companies don't like you.

I don't really care about USA elections bullshit, so here is the real point: we don't usually see this, because, first off, there's supposedly not that many reasons for all of FAANG and such to dislike some random person, and second, if it happens, we'll never hear about it anyway. But if the guy half of the country supports (nevermind he is even so called POTUS) struggles to deal with this, everyone else is completely at their mercy.

So either there is decentralization, or there is this.

I agree. No one should take Stripe's civil liberties away from them.

Vice did an article on this recently, when Telegram tried to kick off ISIS: https://www.vice.com/en/article/vb55bd/telegram-deplatformin...

It's interesting to consider whether the (soon to be former) president of the US deserves similar treatment to a terrorist organization responsible for tens of thousands of civilian deaths.

Therefore, we can't make decisions based on the fear of their response, even if we have a personal aversion to conflict. That's falling into the trap of the abused. We have to make decisions based on defending our principles and standing up for what we believe is right.

No matter what, some people are going to be pissed off at any sufficiently meaningful decision (or indecision). If the people pissed off are violent types, well, then perhaps that's a sign the right decision was made.

I understand that there's a hell of a lot of nuance to this - sometimes you don't poke the sleeping bear. I think Wednesday showed the bear is absolutely not asleep.

Sometimes certain things need to be dealt with by force, there's no way around it.

It seems that that freedom of speech is not the cause of stability, but stability gives rise to (certain degrees) of freedom of speech. It's a slippery slope, but each country has to have a moral basis on which to decide where to draw the line.

It also sends a message that their behavior is unacceptable. That has a very strong influence on culture as a whole. Messages like this are how a lot of civil rights movements have worked.

They have been doing it on other less prominent people and businesses, and haven't suffered any major consequences.

But, this is major escalation in political activism, and likely will not end up the way things have worked out in the past.

This level of coordinated action shouldn’t be possible in a healthy, diverse, competitive environment.

On Wednesday an armed mob literally rushed the Capitol because people didn’t vote the way they wanted them to, with the intent to just force them. It might end up being a “self-defeating travesty”, but only time will tell.

But you seem more worried about a virtual “mob”, which frankly seems insanely out of touch at the moment. And more than a little bit insulting, given that there are actual mobs running around trying to kill members of congress.

The President of the United States just incited insurrection because he lost the election.

This is not a case of somebody being "banned at a whim".

I haven't seen any "proper" news channels touching founding/funding subject.

remaining nodes*

"I am not a fan of Bitcoin and other Cryptocurrencies, which are not money, and whose value is highly volatile and based on thin air. Unregulated Crypto Assets can facilitate unlawful behavior, including drug trade and other illegal activity."

Welcome to the free market at work! Sometimes market forces work against you but you don’t get to complain about it.

Maybe they could have used some of that money to do just that?

There's plenty of money to at least try.

However, forcing people or organizations (which are groups of people) to host or support speech/activities they do not wish to support restricts the rights of those people/organizations.

If you can force them to give up their rights, others can force you to give up your rights.

I can't support that at all.

What's more, the idea that there's some sort of conspiracy/cabal that spans every corporation, industry and profession to murder free speech is a pretty far-fetched one.

There's an old saw that says, "if everyone around you appears to be an asshole, perhaps it's you and not everyone else."

Not obligatory but apropos:

https://xkcd.com/1357

All of this is conjecture, thought experiment off the top of my head that I will not do much to defend. And, of course, none of that is what actually happened.

Or perhaps you let them vent for a bit (mostly harmlessly, but not entirely) and then try to engage with them and bring them back to reality?

Companies providing a service should not care what it is used for. If society has a problem with what people are using services for, it should pass laws, and the companies should comply with the requirements of the law.

I don't know why we are allowing massive companies with unchecked power to make decisions about what is acceptable behaviour on social networks. Since when did they make the laws?

We have a process for this, and it is for democratically elected representatives accountable to their voters to write laws.

Just because you agree with the decisions made by these companies today doesn't mean this is the right process. They're unelected and unaccountable. It's an insult to democracy that we're allowing them to control people's behaviour, even if you agree with them.

No, they're anti-"storm the nation's seat of government with an angry mob intent on killing members of Congress and / or the Vice President, as a last ditch effort to overturn a democratic election"

Personally, I don’t understand how you can acknowledge that you ‘far from love Trump’ (paraphrase) but then consider a banning of his campaign (which is separate from the R party and from conservatism) as against you, a conservative.