A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming

As to your second point, the suppression of speech also has dangerous consequences. Plenty of anti-Semitic thought is rooted in the belief of Jewish control of the media. Suppressing speech probably only serves to reinforce this view.

The reality is that intolerance of hateful speech rarely makes hate go away. Remember, high ranking Nazi leaders were imprisoned, and Völkischer Beobachter (a prominent Nazi publication) was repeatedly banned and had it's offices raided. It didn't stop the spread of Nationalist Socialism. Some historians believe this suppression only accelerated it's rise. It's like the Streisand effect on a political scale.

Aside from instances where the suppression of speech is nearly certain to avoid negative consequences (like specific threats, conspiracy to commit crimes, divulging official secrets or classified information) it is not wise to suppress it. And this doesn't even touch on people attempting to use accusations of hate speech as a political tool (e.g. the "blue lives matter" laws not-so-subtly aimed at suppression of BLM).

Some people's hypocrisy doesn't undermine the core principle of freedom of association. The more abusive the big players become, the more incentive there is for people to use alternatives. Getting the government involved will slow that process and, inevitably, have unforeseen negative consequences.

> And we should not patronize such businesses.

I agree, and that is the best solution.

For example - once upon a time, I could trust the google search engine, g-mail and the chrome browser. I recommended them to other people, and utilized them myself. But now, I can't in good faith steer folks to any google property, because they run the risk of losing access to their data. Today it's fashionable to cut off GAB, what will the moral panic of tomorrow be?

Another example - I used Pay-pal weekly to make purchases and send money to people and causes I supported. But after PayPal began denying service based on what keeps the outrage mob mollified, I've closed my account and have been helping website operating on the dissident right to transition away from a system that might deny them service on a fit of whimsy. Paypal, like so many other platforms, has become too unreliable to be a single point of failure.

All of these institutions were, until the last few years, treated like utilities - which bolstered their reputation for reliability. But now, so many of these giant Near-Monopolies have decided to become overtly political, denying their services without any manner of due process or even a reasonable amount of notice to the people being cast off. This damages the brand reliability, and where once customers could rely on their Registrar, Host, or Payment Processor, they now must consider it imperative to have redundant systems - lest they risk having their service cut because they suddenly find themselves on the bad side of "the fashionable opinion" of the hour. (Goal-posts that move by the hour, and today's cleric of the faith can easily find themselves tomorrow heretic).

A high-trust business environment is required to maintain the sorts of business relationships a content creator enters into with a platform/host/registrar. The fact is, as it stands now, no content creator, business or group can trust these tech-corporations to maintain a stable relationship - or even adhere to a basic contract - in good faith. Once a company - like PayPal for instance - has proven itself unreliable, it has already done half the work of replacing itself.

What if you run a Plemore/Mastodon server that has users with controversial content? Is it okay for Vultr or DigitalOcean or Amazon to just yank your account? Sure you can claim capitalism and find another provider, but we've seen here that finding another provider is hard and migration is expensive!

I wrote about this almost a year ago when it happened to The Daily Stormer and I still think it's more relevant today:

https://fightthefuture.org/article/the-new-era-of-corporate-...

Shutting down platforms just drives people to more extreme platforms. You can't just yell "decentralization" because then you could have providers pulling individual instances of federated ActivityPub/OStatus based software.

At some point we're going to need to address free speech online, because it's not like the real world. You can't just go to another news stand or buy your own printer. There are a limited of people that can host general purpose VMs at a reasonable price with a decent provisioning API.

The domain issue is the most troubling. I don't see any reason a registrar should be allowed to pull domain services from people. Right now it's just content some people don't like, but what if a business starts pulling domain registrar service for business they just don't like, and claim it has to do with hate?