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>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?

I didn't realize that Stripe's actions were due to a government order. Probably because they weren't.

You're conflating a private organization's decisions with government action. If the government were to attempt do as you suggest, the courts would slap them down hard.

It has happened before and recently too, so it wouldn't be exactly be shocking. Sneaked in with other stuff, they told the banks to fuck with sellers of Tobacco, Porn and Drug paraphernalia.

> Operation Choke Point was a 2013 initiative of the United States Department of Justice[1] which investigated banks in the United States and the business they did with firearm dealers, payday lenders, and other companies believed to be at a high risk for fraud and money laundering.

> This operation, disclosed in an August 2013 Wall Street Journal story,[2] was officially ended in August 2017,[3] and the FDIC settled multiple lawsuits by promising to Congress additional training for its examiners and to cease issuing "informal" and "unwritten suggestions" to banks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point

I said:

>If the government were to attempt do as you suggest, the courts would slap them down hard.

The issues around Operation Choke Point[0] that you linked to were investigated by Congress and the Department of Justice and, as I said, smacked down hard.

The above isn't analogous to the current situation, but the result was exactly as I said it would be.

Thanks for making my point for me.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point

Some elements of Operation Choke point were shut down hard, others never even got enough due process to see their day in court. We recently made the prime actors of one of these initiatives the vice president.

( https://reason.com/2019/08/26/secret-memos-show-the-governme... )

So what?

How is that relevant to Stripe? They aren't the government. They're not even one of the top ten biggest payment processors.

I can only conclude that you're not arguing in good faith. More's the pity.

But when the limited collection of players in the system all act in concert to prevent access to opponents of their preferred political party, isn’t the effect nearly the same? Arguably worse, because there’s no legal recourse. I think that’s the point being made here.

Imagine all the airlines were run by Republicans, and they universally prevented anyone who works for Democratic leaning organizations (Eg ActBlue) from flying because some small number of bad actors on their side did some bad things.

We would do well to imagine what it would be like to be prevented access with no legal recourse to an an oligopoly of services that cannot practically be bypassed, and ask ourselves what potential for abuse exists when such impactful decisions can be taken without standard legal due process.

>But when the limited collection of players in the system all act in concert to prevent access to opponents of their preferred political party, isn’t the effect nearly the same? Arguably worse, because there’s no legal recourse. I think that’s the point being made here.

What evidence can you provide to support your claim that various corporations are colluding to block folks?

What evidence can you provide that said corporations have a "preferred political party?"

You have no such evidence. What's more, whether or not the nebulous set of entities to which you refer (let's have specific names and specific actions).

I'd further say that "cloud" (read: someone else's servers) services, a few large social networking sites and a small subset of payment processors (I'm guessing that this is the set of corporations to which you were referring since you don't bother to be specific) do not constitute an "oligopoly."

I'd further add that there are hundreds of hosting and co-location providers, dozens of payment processors and a variety of mechanisms to share data, information and messaging.

I find your diatribe to be sorely lacking in evidence, reasoned argument and factual information.

Finally, your analogy concerning airlines is deeply flawed, as that isn't even close to what's going on.

Please provide some evidence for your claims.

Otherwise, I can only conclude that you are arguing in bad faith.

Actually I think you might have the Colorado case misrepresented here. The baker was ruled in favor due to objecting based on his religious beliefs. Part of this was that he was okay with baking a cake for the gay couple but NOT one that had certain messaging that would violate his faith. [1]

If the baker had altogether refused to bake a cake for the gay couple, it would have been discrimination on a protected class.

https://www.cnn.com/2018/06/04/politics/masterpiece-colorado...

> The baker was ruled in favor due to objecting based on his religious beliefs.

No, he was ruled in favor of because the US Supreme Court found anti-religious animus in the enforcement process leading to the State ruling against him.

> Part of this was that he was okay with baking a cake for the gay couple but NOT one that had certain messaging that would violate his faith.

No, it wasn't. The decision specifically notes that he objected to being required to make cakes for same sex weddings entirely, on both free speech and free exercise of religion grounds [0], not that he was willing to do so dependent on messaging, so any such willingness he might have had was not a basis of the decision.

Instead, the Court found animus toward Phillips’ religious views by the state commission that found against him, both expressed in the process and evidenced through difference in how Phillips was treated vs. other bakers in similar cases before the same Commission, which mean that whether or not the law could otherwise have been enforced against him, the specific government act had an impermissible purpose, requiring it to be struck down. [1]

Note: All quotes from Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd. v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, 584 U.S. ___ (2018)

[0] “Phillips raised two constitutional claims before the ALJ. He first asserted that applying CADA in a way that would require him to create a cake for a same-sex wedding would violate his First Amendment right to free speech by compelling him to exercise his artistic talents to express a message with which he disagreed. [...] Phillips also contended that requiring him to create cakes for same-sex weddings would violate his right to the free exercise of religion, also protected by the First Amendment.”

[1] “The official expressions of hostility to religion in some of the commissioners’ comments—comments that were not disavowed at the Commission or by the State at any point in the proceedings that led to affirmance of the order—were inconsistent with what the Free Exercise Clause requires. The Commission’s disparate consideration of Phillips’ case compared to the cases of the other bakers suggests the same. For these reasons, the order must be set aside.”

Not to mention they are intentionally sending more LGBTQ customers his way to have him politely say no and refer them to another business, just so they can sue him again, and again, and again...

https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/masterpiece-cakeshop...

>they are intentionally sending

Who are they and why do you think they send people?

Absolutely nothing wrong with that

That's how you enforce civil rights laws

It's no different then trying to rent an apartment from a racist to make a case

Indeed he offered the couple any other cake than a custom wedding cake with two men figures on top.

His custom cakes are small works of art. If he'd be forced to create one against his beliefs, why not force a far left painter to paint a favorable portrait of Trump?

And indeed this situation has little to do with Silicon Valley corporations offering generic services to millions of people. They are like supermarkets, who should not be allowed to refuse service to anyone.

AWS isn't like a supermarket. Depending on the context it's better analogised to something like a car rental chain or a large shopping centre. They're providing ongoing, rented, commodity infrastructure that is subject to acceptable use policies.

I think that’s the issue people mix up. He isn’t refusing to do business with anyone because of who they are. He’s refusing to create certain expressions which I should think he has every right to do.

I would expect a Christian cake maker would not agree to accept my money to design a cake that worships satan for example. Likewise I wouldn’t expect a satanic cake maker to make a cake celebrating Jesus.

Would it be right to force an Islamic cake maker to make a cake featuring Muhammad’s likeness?

No he is refusing to make a cake for a gay couple

If he refused to provide groom&groom wedding toppers I'd fully support him but this is food not speech

Likewise I wouldn't expect him to write messages or make decorations he disagreed with

But in this case it's a simple case of discrimination

Literally in the article it says he offered to make them other items... https://www.cnn.com/2018/06/04/politics/masterpiece-colorado...

And literally the Supreme Court decisions stated that he objected to making cakes for gay couples on two separate grounds. To the extent that he may have offered them to make other items, it wasn't part of the basis for the decision, which was entirely about religious animus shown by the Colorado State commission that enforced the law in his case, and not at all about him not actually discriminating because he was willing to do business with gay couples, just not to make the specific cake they wanted.

The fact that something is mentioned in a news article about a court case doesn't mean that (even if it is true) it is part of the basis for the decision. If you want to understand the basis for a court decision, it's best to read the decision itself.

His cakes are food

This seems like a giant loophole to negate anti-discrimination laws.

Are subway "sandwich artists" able to discriminate in their art?

This is inaccurate

The baker discriminated against the couple but the supreme court punted on ruling on the laws and just said the goverment hadn't acted correctly in that case so threw it out. The law is still on record and baker has to abide by it and stop discriminating against gay couples unless the court someday rules otherwise

I don't see how it's anti competetive. The free market advocates on HN would say that other people will create other companies and gain the market share current companies have turned down. Or that existing niche companies will find an expanded market serving them.

It's also important to note that companies aren't cutting ties with Trump because of his political ideology, they're cutting ties with him because there's a strong argument he broke the law, and they don't want to be in the awkward position of facilitating that, especially as it could open them to their own legal liability.

We could say there is a strong argument Joe Biden and his family broke the law, and indeed there's a criminal investigation into Hunter and associates.

However not only did all the big tech companies not withdraw support for Biden or prevent his campaign from using their apps, they doubled down and censored the story so most voters would not hear of it before the elections.

Again, big double standards at play here from a moral sense.

The larger issue here is that the internet really isn't so decentralized as it used to be.

There's like 10-20 major companies that control the majority of services people use, or the underlying infrastructure that powers the whole internet. This goes against the original design of the internet which meant it to be fully decentralized so no single entity or small set of entities could prevent the flow of information.

We should try to go back in that direction, either through competition and free markets or by enforcing it via existing or new regulations to prevent situations like this from ever happening again.

The Hunter Biden conspiracy has been debunked dozens of times over. That’s why the companies haven’t withdrawn support for his family. Trump, OTOH, has pushed the boundaries of acceptable his entire presidency, and has almost certainly broken the law in the process many time.

Do you happen to have a link or other source to this debunking?

I can do a quick google and find so many journalists in twitter saying the story is debunked! What do you want twitter to do in the face of such overwhelming evidence coming from twitter?

It has NOT been debunked. What you have is the media constantly repeating that it has been debunked.

For what is Hunter being investigated for? According to several articles, its for tax and money laundering which is not at all what everyone was making a fuss about a few months ago (the laptop/emails, which reminds me of Hillary and "Her Emails!").

Given that there's uncertainty around it, can we really conclude that "they broke the law" and that it's unfair that big tech did not withdraw their support?

Biden wasn't using Twitter as one of the tools to commit the crime.

That's exactly my stance as a free market advocate. I heavily think it's the wrong move to grant some special status to these existing companies.