French streamer unbanked by Qonto after criticizing Palantir and Peter Thiel
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- He is just a small time streamer, I didn't watch his videos but it looks like typical clickbait content playing on people's paranoia. Why would Palantir care about it?
- I didn't watch the videos in question, but I suppose that he says that Palentir is evil because it is used by police forces to attack poor migrants, that kind of thing. Not only he is saying what everyone is saying, but it may be good advertising for Palantir, as it shows that they are good at their (evil) job.
- Streisand effect, I am sure that even the idiots at Palantir know that it may not be a good idea to give attention to a streamer who annoys them.
- Speaking of attention, it is highly likely that the streamer in question was unbanked for a completely unrelated reason but saw the opportunity to make buzz, and it seems to be working!
- There seem to be no further evidence connecting the two.
Thiel has proved that he can hold a grudge. After Gawker outed him, he spent years shopping for anyone who could sue them, and found his guy in Hulk Hogan. He financed the lawsuit that led to Gawker Media's bankruptcy and closure.
That might be true, but it's a stretch to go from this to "Thiel had a grudge for this specific streamer and was responsible for him getting banned". For one, Gawker has orders of magnitude more visibility than this guy.
Which suggests Thiel doesn't care about the Streisand effect.
When that happens, they won't tell you the reason of course, because that would help fraudsters improve their fraud skills.
There is no reason to believe this bank actually have humans who are aware of this customer's Twitter handle, and who read it, and didn't like what they saw.
TLDR; this is obvious BS.
The streamer is a self-admitted basket case who does not “believe in coincidences”. As far as weird internet belief systems go, this one seems even a bit weirder than people who refuse to believe in a somewhat spherical earth.
For what it's worth, that neobank received funding from his company, which definitely raises the odds of the two being related.
I'd want to see a pattern of multiple critics being banned. In the same video he admits that neobanks have a history of banning clients arbitrarily for seemingly no reason. Just a few months ago there was a story of someone being banned from wise for seemingly dumb reasons made it to the front page[1], so it's certainly possible for people to get banned because of pure incompetence. Therefore you'd expect a base rate of Palantir/Thiel critics banned from pure coincidence alone.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45766253
>For what it's worth, that neobank received funding from his company, which definitely raises the odds of the two being related.
Right, just like you can come up with some spurious relationships from people being banned from wise, like the CEO hating pineapple on pizza (example, no idea whether he actually does) and the person being banned liking pineapple on pizza.
So it's cool if one person gets deplatformed, as long as it's not a pattern? Odd choice if you ask me.
Personally if one side is financially backed by someone as insane as Thiel, I tend to need very little evidence from the other side to believe it.
For what it's worth Wise was also funded by Thiel, so he'd be somewhat to blame (not fully, of course) for that incompetence as well.
No, it's not cool even if it's just one person. The point is that you should absolutely be upset at the bank for arbitrarily banning someone for no reason, but not at Peter Thiel or Palantir, since it being just one non-high-profile critic means there's no good reason to think they had anything to do with it.
Shifting the blame to "incompetence" does not absolve him of any guilt, he is equally to blame for that as well.
Your initial post suggested that we should assume that there is a link; now you're backing up to "Thiel takes some blame from bad actions by companies he invests in," which is a much weaker but more defensible claim.
We can go back to my original claim if you want to, but my stance would remain the same as it did it in my first comment: if on one side of the argument we have a company directly funded by Thiel and on the other side we have literally anyone else, I personally don't need any strong evidence to believe that other side, as I am well-familiar with Thiel.
If you're talking about my comment, you must be mistaken because "incompetence" almost by definition is blameworthy.
That is the only business model of neobanks: be more incompetent than traditional banks, skirt the laws as much as you can get away with by being "new", raise prices through the roof once you have enough suckers because you have "better UX", raise the prices even further once traditional banks catch up and convince a certain percentage of your users to switch back, shut down entirely once you've burned through the market and cannot convince anyone new to use you.
Only weakly, and closer to "all boeing shareholders are to blame for the accidents associated with the 737 MAX" than what was originally claimed, which was that he was specifically banned as some sort of retribution for his criticism of Thiel.
Why? It’s the regulators who are to blame for that, not the bank.
Then, we would need to understand what his actual criticism was. Have other people made similar criticisms and faced de-banking?
Then, we would need to understand his other activities, and whether they could have led to a de-banking (if he was in fact de-banked).
* Peter Thiel, a man who does not speak French, discovers that a French streamer is saying mean things about Palantir. Lots of people say mean things about Palantir, since they do so many bad things, but this particular criticism is just so cutting Thiel feels he has to do something about it.
* He searches through every investment he's ever made, singling out all the French ones, and sends their executive teams an email saying that this one specific French guy sucks and they shouldn't do business with him.
* The executive team at Qonto, a profitable company with 600,000 customers and almost €500M in annual revenue, receives the message and decides that they'd like to help one of their dozens of investors with his personal revenge campaign.
It's not 100% impossible, but it's so implausible I don't think it's reasonable to believe based on a coincidence.
As for speaking French, it's trivial to translate languages.
The evidence that a company is profitable or large has zero relation to it's decisions around dropping a customer?
You've created a strawman of suppositions that are not accurate, and then casually blow away the strawman.
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I don't like Palantir, and I don't like Peter Thiel because of his role in creating it. It's a bad company that does bad things. I won't work for Palantir, it's shameful that anyone does work for Palantir, and the world would be much improved if Palantir went bankrupt tomorrow.
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I'll come back and admit defeat if I get booted off of Thiel-funded technology platforms in a few days, but I know and I strongly suspect you know that's not going to happen.
It's "more implausible" to you that a company who's job it is to monitor online sentiment about a particular company would be able to identify negative sentiment? So your argument is that these online monitoring businesses do not offer a real product?
> I'll come back and admit defeat if I get booted off of Thiel-funded technology platforms in a few days, but I know and I strongly suspect you know that's not going to happen.
Could you look up what a strawman is, and stop using them in your arguments?
It should be against the law to privately retaliate like this.
It seems pretty in character and it's not like there is another more plausible reason being offered.
In character of what, that Thiel is a mustache twirling villain? Did other companies backed by him have a history of banning his critics?
>It seems pretty in character and it's not like there is another more plausible reason being offered.
By his own admission, neobanks have a history of banning clients arbitrarily without recourse. My guess it's run of the mill incompetence, not oppressing Thiel's critics.
Not just neobanks, sadly. Even old-fashioned banks like Chase do so with alarming regularity.
I mean it's pretty common these days to see that billionaires can be thin skinned little twerps that hold a vendetta. Elon Musk is the biggest example of one that shows up and talks shit when someone tries to hurt his feefees.
Now, if you're powerful but not quite as dumb as Elon can be socially, you're not going to do the work yourself. You'll have a social media management team that takes care of the work for you.
Well, yes, exactly. Sorry it's that simple & unsatisfying but it absolutely is.
I mean, yes? You don't amass billions of dollars with subtlety?
[1] https://www.inc.com/jeff-bercovici/peter-thiel-young-blood.h...
[2] https://theintercept.com/2017/02/22/how-peter-thiels-palanti...
(not that I think TFA here is very likely to be true)
Yes, Peter Theil is a mustache twirling villain, I thought this was common knowledge?
I just did a ctrl-F on this page and nowhere was the word "Paypal" included. So I'm including it.
I read what he wrote ("L’art de la guerre russe, comment l’Occident a conduit l’Ukraine à l’échec"), you can download it temporarily here : [2]. His book is absolutely not pro-russia nor pro-EU.
[1] https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/various/former-swiss-intelligen...
[2] https://www.swisstransfer.com/d/0117e2b4-8e70-4343-8097-7bfe...
Come on. That's your "totally not pro-russia" example ?
What you are saying is not correct; perhaps you are confusing it with the right to an account?
https://www.banque-france.fr/fr/a-votre-service/particuliers...
That doesn't mean a bank can't close your account. It just means that if you have none, a bank can be told to give you one.
The only debanking cases I've been aware of were the US putting pressure on judges from the International Court and a special appointee of the UN for Palestine.
Also, "freezing" the funds without a court judgement or the opportunity of retrieving them is effectively theft. If you didn't pay the parking fees on my property for a couple days, it's not legal for me to just boot or chain it or hide it somewhere (at least in the US), and I think the same should go here.
Consumer protection laws obviously don't apply to businesses, and banks close business accounts all the time for not following the terms of services. That sounds like a MUCH more probably cause than "I said mean things about Palantir".
> They are lying to you. They keep repeating that "it's your money". It's false. It’s only a temporary access right that the system can take away from you with one click.
> I dared to criticize Palantir. A few days later, @getqonto deactivated my card, closed my account and blocked my funds. Without a word. I was erased, and I don’t believe in coincidences.
> When a "French unicorn" is funded by Peter Thiel’s millions, freedom of speech becomes a risk. Who really holds the switch to your life?
it seems simply unproven, but plausible to me.