If you were cut off from social media, payment processors, web hosts and mail providers, would you practically be able to launch a political campaign?
Parler being booted is society's reaction to a movement that has been getting more extreme for the last 5 years.
I'll note the irony that many of the people complaining about companies refusing to deal with Parler are the same people that support bakeries being able to deny the business of people in a protected class.
I have sympathy for the former, but not the latter. While it would be kind to reach out to the latter group and help them mesh with society, there's no requirement anyone has to nor a guarantee the pariahs would want to mesh.
No, we dont have to distinguish that. Your weak premise would justify the discrimination of atheists, anarchists, monarchists, pentecostals,marxists, epicureans... among thousands of other groups.
I dont really understand why it is so complicated.
At individual and private level I can decide who will I spend my time with, who I will invite to my place, go to the beach etc, with no coercion and I expect everybody else to have that right too.
At public level I have the expectation to serve all the people the same (ceteris paribus) unless I am forced by current legislation to not do so (like selling alcohol to a minor).
I would not extend that prohibition to a person who can request my services legally , if the person is going to pay and if he is going to behave like any other customer.
If I manage a 7/11 I would not create an ideological purity test to figure out if I will sell you gas or a soda and I think society will be way better if everybody does that too.
I’m not saying they act evilly, but Facebook is literally controlled by one person who cannot be outvoted by every other owner. And Google is controlled by two as well [0].
[0] https://fortune.com/2019/12/05/page-and-brin-google-control/
Nobody is thinking society is just big tech people. There are a lot of people who agree with tech's decision to cut off coup enablers.
Of course the key characteristic of secret cabals is that they are secret.
While I know of no evidence for secret cabals of big tech people, having individual capable of making unaccountable decisions is a different bad thing than secret cabals.
And I responding to someone saying these were big organizations with lots of decision makers. And that’s false for Facebook and google, since they have power concentrated.
Well it's hard to argue against it when the people being cut out are trying to pipe-bomb your headquarters as well as the Democrats :/.
See this is part of the problem.
You are lumping together two different organizations that are nothing alike as somehow part of the same cabal.
Many different people from many different groups and organizations are reaching the same conclusion about Trump and the rise of violent right wing extremism.
Different parts of society are agreeing, and then in each of these parts there are individuals making decisions.
> Revolving doors, clientelism, business opportunities, power struggle,...
Add activism, donations, candidate support and cooperating with them on a local and global level.
Seems like a text book definition of a political party.
Look back a few decades and this is exactly the same argument that segregationists were using. You've basically just said: "That shopowner has a right not to deal with blacks, why do they keep harassing that poor man by trying to buy his goods?".
> I will note the irony about people saying that we should respect society “decisions” when they didn’t respect Trump becoming president since day one . Come on pal drop the dishonesty.
Those people didn't leave pipe-bombs at both party headquarters, call for their own Vice President to be hanged, or storm the Capitol building though. It's both transparent and dishonest to try to equate the two. Especially when you consider that Trump was one of the people peddling the birther nonsense about Obama and that pretty much everyone involved with the trump campaign was actually found guilty of some form of corruption. Trump himself has only escaped charges by virtue of being the President.
Speaking of landlords who discriminate, Trump has never done anything to deserve a shred of respect. Long before day one. If anything they're saving gullible people from sending money to a conman
I think this is the issue though, right. Elections represent what society wants. If 5 corporations get to decide you’re toxic and that prevents you from campaigning, what regulation will help insure this authority isn’t abused or misused?
I think it’s also worth noting the irony that many of the people complaining that bakers should be forced to bake a cake are supporting stripe being able to refuse service.
It's only ironic if you choose to ignore the fact that one of those cases involves discrimination against a protected class and the other does not. If you don't ignore that fact then the irony is only applicable from those who were espousing the "free market, free speech" position in the previous case.
But even if it was a protected class at the time of the suite, I think the opinion was that religious rights (another protected class) come into play.
For me, this seems to expose that some people aren’t arguing from first principles but kind of change their position based on a pre-conceived notion.
So just like people now bringing up that looting isn’t so bad after the capital riot/insurrection were against rioting in situations over the summer.
It seems odd to me, or at least irrational, that someone could be against rioting for BLM purposes but for rioting for conspiracy theories. Or that someone could be against a baker’s ability to not serve a gay couple, but for a hosting company not serving an asshole megaphone company.
So just as people, rightly I think, were arguing that discrimination against sexual orientation should be a protected class and thus illegal; people now are arguing that net neutrality/free speech should have regulation, change in rights.
It’s not “ironic” in either sense.
The _actions_ by a group of people are resulting in these bans. Not the group's affiliation. Am I missing something here?
But to more directly address your point, I ask you - what crime has Trump been convicted of?
But to give you a partial answer anyway: Many criminals are never convicted. Many _known_ criminals are never convicted, due to lack of undeniable proof. Some criminals are convicted on lesser crimes, just to get them off the streets. There's plenty of evidence to support the position that Trump is a criminal. He may never be convicted but not because he's innocent.
The discussion is whether they should be able to kick someone off their platform who has been convicted of no crime, because of how integral they have become to the political process.
If it was a power company shutting off electricity to Facebok, Twitter and AWS, because they disagree with their business practices, we would have an outrage right now about how undemocratic it is.
(And I say this with all my distaste for Trumpism)
After all, a free speech advocate and a neo-nazi would both support the publication of Mein Kampf - but the former might well want to be clear they're not the latter. (and of course, to complicate the situation further, the latter may want to disguise themselves as the former)
As to why you see so many posters affirming they don't support Trump - that's because HN readers aren't Trump's target demographics: Trump only got 12% of the vote in San Francisco in 2020. IMHO it's believable that on HN, free speech advocates simply outnumber Trump supporters.
https://techcrunch.com/2019/10/23/just-6-of-u-s-adults-on-tw...
As for Google + Apple + Amazon (+ probably every other cloud provider and virtually every other hosting company) cutting off Parler or refusing their business in the first place: Parler was accused of not moderating "enough". This in itself is not yet criminal, given section 230 (which in this context ironically Trump wanted gone so bad he tried to hold the military budget hostage over it), and the definition of "enough moderation" was kept vague enough by Apple and Google and Amazon that Parler couldn't possibly ever comply if they wanted to.
The same argument about under-moderation can be made against facebook, e.g. when they aided - or even enabled - the Rohingya genocide, which saw thousands of people killed and hundreds of thousands of people displaced. Even the UN directly pointed fingers at facebook. Facebook admitted to their role[1], but came up with a bunch of lame excuses like that they do not really have any content moderators that understand the language.
People dug up quite a number of screenshots (anecdotal evidence) of abhorrent things written on Parler to justify them getting punished. But I found that not really convincing to single out Parler like that. If I went digging on Twitter or Facebook, or could see what people tell each other in Whatapp of Telegram groups, I would find the exact same things. I have reported things on twitter in the past, like people making extremely thinly-veiled death threats or inciting violence, and twitter's response has been sluggish and often in favor of the people talking about "nooses" and "you'll get what's coming to you" in the same sentence.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/06/technology/myanmar-facebo...
BLM may claim not to be responsible for the horrendous roiots and crime that has been committed in its name across America.
Trump may claim that he is not responsible for the tiny (in proportion) riots that happened in DC.
(IMO, they are both responsible, thus making BLM the one with more blood on its hands. But nobody asked me.)
BLM may claim that it is in their rights to fight law and order if it causes harm to individuals.
Trump may claim it is in his right to complain about law and order when (in his opinion) it was not lawful.
(IMO, this is a finer line. He certainly can legally complain. Riots are over the line for either right or left)
Stripe processes payments for BLM, and Twitter allows their posts, etc. So IMO the line they walk is fine and biased.
...or, conversely, we should compare damage and lives lost during Black Lives Matter protests to all damage and lives lost by Trump-supporting white supremacists.
As for your question, probably not. And there is an interesting debate as to whether political candidates should be some sort of protected class. Though I don't think the issue is particularly urgent given that political candidates across the political spectrum (including Donald Trump) still have access to all of those things.
For the most part, payment process, web hosts, and mail providers are interchangeable, so I don't think it is a big deal that Trump can't use Stripe specifically.
Social Media is more complicated. I guess we will see how things develop, but my intuition is that Trump will open a parler account, interested parties will follow him there, uninterested parties won't, and his most noteworthy statements will be widely reported in the media. So, the same situation as when Trump was on Twitter.