Venmo Stops Payments for Palestinian Relief Funds, Citing 'Security Concerns' | Hacker News Reader

Venmo Stops Payments for Palestinian Relief Funds, Citing 'Security Concerns'

gizmodo.com

66 pointsah3nan12 comments

Any donations in cryptocurrency would be unable to be stopped, so in times like these it's when it truly shines. Sure, you can't guarantee some degree of support won't go to Hamas or any other terrorist organization, but the same can be said of cash anyway, and then you won't be having any private company getting in the way of what's acceptable and what isn't.

Some organization do fund Hamas with the money they collect in name of charity. Some charities are exclusively created for this purpose.

A blanket ban is still not the answer. We need better ways to separate genuine charities from terror outfits.

My guess is that they're trying to stop funding to go into the Hamas so yeah...

I wish the US to stop funding Israel too

Wow... I have never reactively uninstalled an app so quickly,

I'll take the downvote. people need to start speaking out about the apartheid in Palestine

These tech publications are so biased that it’s hard to get through even the first paragraph. In the first two sentences they talk about violence on only one side and the call Venmo “petty”.

I hope we get to a place some day where we as consumers reject this kind of journalism wholesale and opt instead to try and understand the nuance so we might get to actual solutions. Because far too many people have died in this conflict alone.

We need laws that prevent deplatforming / censorship on these large technology platforms, once they reach a certain number of users. These practices effectively oppress people and limits them at the whims of those who control the platform or the loudest/most powerful voice they pressures them. Since larger platforms are as influential as governments we need to recognize them as such and guard our society against them. Now that this issue is affecting those who have at times been proponents of deplatforming as well, I hope there’s broader support for appropriate regulation protecting the rights of individuals online.

You will never get these laws because they do not benefit the big corporate and state actors. These people need to learn to not depend on a single point of failure and to avoid companies which are known offenders like Paypal for example.

At least in the context of platform-to-business interactions, the EU has done much of this (in the context of kicking someone off a platform they sell through) in Regulation 2019/1150.

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:32...

They don't necessarily go as far as you're looking for (and I'd agree that some platforms are effectively becoming societal infrastructure), but it's a start. I'm not aware of anyone really putting these to use yet, suggesting the remedies aren't helpful enough or accessible enough.

This is Venmo complying with the law, if you read the article. It’s not their own initiative - they’re just complying with US export restrictions that make funding certain overseas organizations illegal.

A much better solution, that doesn't violate the right to free association and private property, is for the government to fund the development of open-source peer-to-peer electronic cash systems.

Such systems would be censorship resistant by design, which is a far more robust solution to deplatforming than legislation written by Congressional representatives and their staff, that attempts to use one-size-fits-all rules determining under what conditions deplatforming is justified, or appointing all-powerful committees/agencies that make these determinations on a case-by-case basis, and thereby become the target of regulatory capture campaigns.

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