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Comment by nuklearwanze | Hacker News Reader

The thing about free speech is, that you are not entitled to be agreed with.

And it seems, paypal really doesn't agree with the rhetoric on the daily sceptic - just at a glance this looks to be completely understandable. If, as a private company, paypal doesn't want to be associated with a website that thrives on misinformation and fearmongering, you can't really be surprised - that's just bad for business.

I completely get the argument, that free speech shall not be limited by anyone. But as a society we have to decide if free speech should also cover blatant lies and deliberate misinformation.

just as a free society should fight any movement that wants to limit the freedoms of others, sews hate or doesn't follow the principles of a free society, free speech advocates should probably fight against peddlers of misinformation.

It's not all black and white, not all or nothing with this one... we can have nuance in this debate.

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> I completely get the argument, that free speech shall not be limited by anyone. But as a society we have to decide if free speech should also cover blatant lies and deliberate misinformation.

I hear this position a lot in relation to free speech and it's one I can't understand for the life of me. I guess I don't know what a blatant lie is, and further I know it's something I've been accused of many times in my life when attempting to speak the truth.

I have two questions for you:

* 1: If I say something that I genuinely believe, but is strongly contradicted by evidence that I may or may not be aware of do I have a right to say it?

* 2: If I say something that I believe is factually incorrect would I not have any right to say it?

Perhaps an example here would help. So something I've noticed is there are a lot of conspiracy theory websites which talk about an invisible man that can cure sick people. As far as I can tell this seems to be contradicted by the evidence and these people seem to be either blatantly lying or just completely ignorant of current scientific data. In some cases people who run these website are causing real world harm by convincing people that they shouldn't seek professional medical treatment for their illnesses because the invisible man will take care of them. My understanding is that in some cases conspiracy theorists are even refusing to get vaccinated because they believe the invisible man doesn't want them to get vaccinated.

I'm just wondering if you believe that websites dedicated to the invisible man conspiracy theory should be banned? And if so should those causing real world harm by lying about the invisible man be held to account for their actions?

What you consider “misinformation” today may turn out to be the truth tomorrow. I am not familiar with this site, but do you have examples of the “blatant lies and deliberate misinformation”?

Imagine if in 2001 everyone used your argument to deplatform anyone who said that Iraq did not have WMDs. Imagine if anyone who claimed that the U.S. recruited Nazi scientists to work in the U.S. government after World War II had their funds cut off. Imagine if anyone who suggested that smoking cigarettes was unhealthy or could lead to cancer in the 1940s was banned. There are countless examples of things like this.

Your line of thinking here is very dangerous because the justification to ban or deplatform people you disagree with today will be the same one used to ban people you agree with tomorrow.

The other thing is, as you pointed out, the issue is not black and white. Neither is the classification about what is considered “hate speech” or “misinformation”. Are you comfortable with big tech giants making those decisions?

I want the right to deplatform people for any reason. It my money I'm using to run my site and I should get to choose who uses it for what, with any rationale, or no rationale.

If society feels there's some gain to be had by restricting this, then let's legislate (because the platforms already ban people to maximize their profit, they're not giving that up willingly). Though, honestly, that's such a minefield I have trouble imagining the form effective legislation would take.

I think there is a fine line between a tech company and a financial services company.

Do you think it is okay for a bank to restrict people access to their own money or deny bank accounts because of opinions they hold or things they say?

It’s really easy to make claims like this when you don’t think the rules would ever apply to you. “Oh they are just targeting some fringe site on the internet. That’s perfectly within their rights”.

The precedent is what is dangerous. Imagine a world where if anyone says anything bad about billionaires, they are no longer allowed to use financial services.

I don't think it's ok in this case. I say we regulate PayPal.

But also that we steer clear of any talk of the right to use other people's sites in general. That's far too far.

The precedent was already set, but the people screaming about free speech today didn't care then because it was queers and sex workers losing their livelihoods.

At least give people their money back then. PayPal also held their funds.

I agree that there some be some law that makes this happen swiftly.

I only read the DS occasionally these days, but to accuse this particular site of fear-mongering is really just a knee jerk reaction that shows you don't know anything about it.

The site was originally born as Lockdown Sceptics in ~March 2020 and has historically been devoted to combating fear, not engaging in it. The site's history consists mostly of articles arguing that lockdowns and other COVID countermeasures were an overreaction based on hysteria and bad assumptions by governments/academics. In 2020 of course this was considered incredible heresy and "misinformation" even though a lot of the people writing for it were actual doctors, scientists and researchers themselves.

Since the UK PM leadership contest, several high ranking members of the Johnson administration have walked back their previous support for lockdowns and judging from the Spectator/Telegraph the feeling inside the ruling party is now much more aligned with the Daily Sceptic's writers - the Cabinet woke up to the fact that SAGE were feeding them misinformation and the scale of the problem was being regularly exaggerated. E.g. Rishi Sunak said the Treasury had someone on SAGE conf calls for a while who didn't speak, so they didn't realize she was there, and she fed notes back to Sunak who then compared then to the official minutes the government was being sent. What a surprise, the official minutes expunged any mention of dissent or disagreement with whatever the most extreme proposals were.

At some point Lockdown Sceptics became the Daily Sceptic and it branched out. Since then it covers not only COVID topics but also generic anti-woke stuff, debate about the situation in Ukraine (with Ian Rons and Toby Young taking up the more conventional side of the argument and others arguing against), and a bunch of other stuff I'm not so interested in.

Nonetheless the idea that they spread misinformation let alone "hate" is absurd. The writers are mostly a bunch of middle aged academics and journalists making various counter-cultural points, who use graphs and data tables 10x more than the average journalist does.

Speech is one thing, taking money that lawfully belongs to somebody else is another.

Who exactly decides what misinformation is? Remember when Twitter started banning people for discussing the lab leak theory, which turned out to be true?

> Remember when Twitter started banning people for discussing the lab leak theory, which turned out to be true?

The lab leak theory hasn't turned out to be true, so no.

> which turned out to be true?

Now that’s a bold claim.

The lab leak theory has not been proven nor is there any evidence

It pains me to defend antivaccine idiots, but it's not the payment processor's business. Be it paypal, visa or anyone else.

Sure, but PayPal entered a contract, and there should be a legal means to break the contract, not just by a whim because of something seen on Twitter.

Sure, which PayPal used:

> If we believe that you’ve engaged in any of these activities, we may take a number of actions to protect PayPal, its customers and others at any time in our sole discretion. The actions we may take include, but are not limited to, the following:

> Terminating this user agreement, limiting your PayPal account (and any linked Balance Account), and/or closing or suspending your PayPal account (and any linked Balance Account), immediately and without penalty to us;

I just bet the PayPal terms also included words to the effect of "We can alter this deal, already couched in the vaguest possible terms, whenever we please without any notice other than this."

Those are among the first actually.

Fun fact is they disclose them differently for personal and business accounts.

Given the Paypal "contract" (T&Cs) is longer than most published works, I suspect there are 4,122 "outs" specifically written into the contract that let's Payal do practically whatever the hell they want.

You don't know if they didn't have a valid reason

By your own logic, Paypal may decide not to be associated with anyone based on any random criteria, including opinions, race, sex, age etc. It can be black and white, of course, just not today.

No, state and federal law explicitly create protected classes, and describe the scope of protections granted. A service provider would be opening itself up to huge liability if it cut someone’s service based on, for instance, race or gender.

You are missing the point: PayPal does NOT provide any specific reason for the termination, so there is NO protected class as you cannot prove they terminated an account for speech, race or gender.

Giving no reason, absent a contractual or legal requirement to provide one, falls far short of offering up a blatantly illegal explanation. Even so, companies have clearly been found guilty of illegal discrimination, even when they went out of their way to hide their unlawful motivations.

But not political stance? Seems a glaring oversight. Unless the people who wrote the regulations like being able to request a payment processor shut off campaign donations to any newcomer with better ideas than them. But that would make them beholden to the business interests that actually control the money, and leave them helpless to enforce any real regulations on the same. Surely no elected representative would be so shortsighted ;o)

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