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Patreon Bars Anti-Feminist for Racist Speech, Inciting Revolt

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Re: Patreon Bars Anti-Feminist for Racist Speech, Inciting Revolt

#481

Post by dwsfzdsfasf »

root_axis wrote: post #474
orthecreedence wrote: post #33

I'm torn about this. On the one hand, Patreon shouldn't have to do business with people they don't like. On the other hand, at what point do we accept that we have different viewpoints and live and let live? The biggest one for me in recent history was Cloudflare arbitrarily deciding to stop hosting the Daily Stormer. Sure, DS is vile, but at the point we start enforcing censorship on a whim instead of hardened polic…

I think you're way way way overthinking this. The bottom line is that an online service can ban any user for any reason, period. Just because a service is popular doesn't mean that you have a right to use it. If you don't like how a company operates their business, then you can start a boycott or use a competitor. > the world handing them the reigns. Nobody is handing anyone the reigns. Patreon didn't even exist a fe…

"The bottom line is that an online service can ban any user for any reason, period. "

Agreed.

And the govt (US and EU) can break them up whenever they they attain market monopoly. Or governments (every other one) can decide they've had enough with arbitrary content control by foreigners and ban their service within their borders.

Which is fine, really. I dont b%^h about FB and friends kicking someone out of their service. I expect the enlightened not to b^&h when countries ban services they like.

The Internet as we knew it in the 90s is dead. Time to get over it.

Re: Patreon Bars Anti-Feminist for Racist Speech, Inciting Revolt

#482

Post by Noos »

orthecreedence wrote: post #66
iguy wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if it's centralisation so much as personification. Patreon wants to be a a friendly brand, part of people's self-image. And having chosen this, perhaps they can't afford to live and let live. It's very difficult to imagine Bell Telephone (in their 100% monopoly days I mean) feeling responsible for what people discuss on their wires, or feeling a need to deny (say) pornographers service so that its other…

Personification makes sense to me, at least in regards to Patreon. But then you get to Youtube...a stroll through the comment section of any video makes you realize you're in the digital version of Mos Eisley. There is no brand to protect, yet they wave their censorship wand quite often, including just this last week ( https://www.businessinsider.com/r-youtube-under-pressure-for... ). It seems a lot of these videos w…

We are talking about the same Patreon that is host to a tremendous amount of porn and fetish artists, right? Many of whom are in the top 50 of creators? Personfication suddenly matters now?

Re: Patreon Bars Anti-Feminist for Racist Speech, Inciting Revolt

#483

Post by joe_the_user »

epicureanideal wrote: post #451
joe_the_user wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If some publisher, newspaper, or literary magazine refused to publish Walt Whitman, he could always try and find another publisher. But if Twitter bans Titania McGrath, there is no other Twitter for her to join because the next best alternative has 1/10000th the number of users. This is pretty much exactly wrong (the situation is basically the exact opposite). When there were a very finite number of publishers in the…

The problem is if you do set up your own website, a very small number of companies you choose from can each decide to deplatform you, and very soon unless you're unusually technically savvy you will be unable to speak your message.

While I'd deplore everything about it, I would note that the most well American fascist website was online when I checked a moment ago. And I'd note that the effort deplatform that site occurred because it was quite well known and truly obscure publications are much less likely to get that treatment (for good or ill).

Which is to say that net now certainly makes a wider range of views available to those interested than ever before. There's still individual apathy or skepticism keeping people from sample this Niagara but that doesn't seem like the worst. Many people like their platform filtering out racist garbage and hey, that seems like not entirely terrible.

But the contrast is that in a small city in the US in the 1950s, a person would have to physically leave their location to get more "risque" or "extreme" publications of any political stripe.

Re: Patreon Bars Anti-Feminist for Racist Speech, Inciting Revolt

#484

Post by jyounker »

asdffdsa wrote: post #282
zamalek wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> On the other hand, at what point do we accept that we have different viewpoints and live and let live? The government, soapboxes, homes and places of business that are happy to have them. Freedom of Speech is not the right to be heard. If people don't like what you have to say, or how you are saying it, they are free to walk away. If you don't like what someone is doing in your place of business, you can also throw…

The problem is, "intolerance" is an arbitrary distinction, especially over time and especially now. In sites like Patreon, Youtube, or Reddit which apparently presume to operate as a free marketplace to identify, discuss, and promote ideas, censoring those which merely hate (rather than actively condone actual/specific acts of violence) sets the precedent toward greater and more arbitrary censorship (whether people t…

I’ve seen it happen. I’ve seen them shouted down by the bar tender and patrons too.

Generally though the people in the ranter’s vicinity get up and walk away.

Re: Patreon Bars Anti-Feminist for Racist Speech, Inciting Revolt

#485

Post by gnu8 »

jmalicki wrote: post #128
gnu8 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am surprised that the picture in the article is their working environment. Is it really necessary in a tech company that everyone be asses-to-elbows like so?

Those look like pretty standard 48-inch desks comparing to the size of the 27" screens - just like 99% of other workplaces I've seen. Do you know of places where larger desks are remotely common?

I don’t know what is common, but apparently I’m living the high life in that I have a L shaped desk and cubicle walls so I don’t have to see my fellow man.

Re: Patreon Bars Anti-Feminist for Racist Speech, Inciting Revolt

#486

Post by harshreality »

zamalek wrote: post #120
orthecreedence wrote: post #33

I'm torn about this. On the one hand, Patreon shouldn't have to do business with people they don't like. On the other hand, at what point do we accept that we have different viewpoints and live and let live? The biggest one for me in recent history was Cloudflare arbitrarily deciding to stop hosting the Daily Stormer. Sure, DS is vile, but at the point we start enforcing censorship on a whim instead of hardened polic…

> On the other hand, at what point do we accept that we have different viewpoints and live and let live? The government, soapboxes, homes and places of business that are happy to have them. Freedom of Speech is not the right to be heard. If people don't like what you have to say, or how you are saying it, they are free to walk away. If you don't like what someone is doing in your place of business, you can also throw…

These platforms are becoming the de facto public square, and there is not necessarily room for a bunch of competing platforms to function collectively as a public square; one will tend to dominate for each form of content, it appears.

These platforms are supposed to do two things:

- blog/media hosting, both storage and web distribution

- Handling regulatory and coding requirements for accepting payments, via a trustworthy single payee... so that subscribers aren't having to provide credit card numbers to every random content creator out there

These platforms are violating expectations by going beyond solving those problems and trying to be a nanny. We don't need nannies on the internet.

They aren't even doing a good job of being a neutral nanny. On patreon, there is a ton of objectionable content depending on your point of view and morality. (On youtube, there is a ton of garbage content, though not much adult/erotic material because it's mostly banned.) If either platform cared about the perception of their platforms being a place for content appropriate for a formal dinner party, they wouldn't operate as they do now.

In the case of Patreon, if someone doesn't like a patreon creator's content, they don't have to subscribe to it. Patreon content is discoverable, but it's not self-promoted by Patreon, so people aren't generally going to see much that they find objectionable. For platforms like youtube, which use subscriptions/histories to recommend other videos unsolicited, there needs to be a better tagging system so visitors can blacklist tags that will trigger them. Other than that, these platforms are not, and should not pretend to be, in the nanny business. And everyone needs to have a thick enough skin that they can encounter a summary, title, or first few seconds of a video they find offensive and simply laugh it off as internet idiots being idiots, and navigate elsewhere rather than pretending they have moral justification to complain to platforms about content that is neither violence-promoting nor defamatory.

Re: Patreon Bars Anti-Feminist for Racist Speech, Inciting Revolt

#487

Post by orthecreedence »

fzeroracer wrote: post #322
orthecreedence wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wrote my post with complete awareness of the fact that neo-nazis, and others like them, exist. I don't really see what your comment adds to the discussion. Yes, some of the ideas are objectively bad. That doesn't mean there isn't a growing censorship movement, which incidentally often uses "nazi" lingo as an excuse to selectively silence people. Also note that I gave a nod to, and firmly believe in, not inciting vi…

Have you considered that we see the growing use of Nazi lingo because the amount of violence being committed by neo-nazis is rising? You can say 'believe whatever you want', but what we've clearly seen is that belief turning into action. This in turn is why platforms are taking action against them.

> Have you considered that we see the growing use of Nazi lingo because the amount of violence being committed by neo-nazis is rising?

I think the rise in calling other people Nazis is more a symptom of political polarization than of a resurgence of violent national socialist gangs. To that end, I think the media itself is vastly more culpable than r/the_donald or gab.

Are they organizing and rallying more? Yeah, it seems so. Does censoring them on youtube or patreon keep them from organizing? No...but it does smell of the beginnings of what the communist which hunt was 70 years ago, and the collateral damage that came with it.

When everyone starts banning Nazis, then the answer to "What actually is a Nazi?" becomes "anything I do not like."

Re: Patreon Bars Anti-Feminist for Racist Speech, Inciting Revolt

#488

Post by SolaceQuantum »

kristofferR wrote: post #447
bunderbunder wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that Twitter is way more popular than Mastodon doesn't really change anything. It's freedom of speech , not freedom of venue.

If you are only allowed to speak freely when noone can hear you - are you then allowed freedom of speech?

I believe the answer is yes, in that no one is forced to read spam or flyers.

Re: Patreon Bars Anti-Feminist for Racist Speech, Inciting Revolt

#489

Post by jyounker »

dkersten wrote: post #272
zamalek wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> On the other hand, at what point do we accept that we have different viewpoints and live and let live? The government, soapboxes, homes and places of business that are happy to have them. Freedom of Speech is not the right to be heard. If people don't like what you have to say, or how you are saying it, they are free to walk away. If you don't like what someone is doing in your place of business, you can also throw…

Theres a fine line between “being allowed to throw a loud ranting racist out of a pub” because the pub is your business and you should be allowed to choose who to do business with and you don’t like racists... and throwing out a person of a different race because it’s your business and you should be allowed to choose who to do business with and don’t like that race... That is, we want businesses to have the right to…

There isn’t a fine line. One is based on a person’s beliefs. The other is based on a person’s genetics.

Re: Patreon Bars Anti-Feminist for Racist Speech, Inciting Revolt

#490

Post by repolfx »

krapp wrote: post #466
SolaceQuantum wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m confused why patreons behavior is newly unacceptable in a way that sparks controversy. I agree that it is likely a problem overall, but I don’t understand what has occurred that has made it new to discuss.

>I don’t understand what has occurred that has made it new to discuss. A lot of people in the tech community and on HN sympathize with the ideology of people being deplatformed, particularly regarding alt-right and "anti-feminist" views.

Really? How many anti-feminists are there on Hacker News? Very few, I'd say, especially as such views tend to be immediately downvoted and flagged into oblivion.

There are however plenty of people who are disturbed by the systematic way certain minorities attack and destroy speech about ideas that are, objectively, commonplace and popular (just look at opinion polls).

Even the top voted comment on this whole thread talks about disquiet over censorship whilst ending by saying they're a left leaning socialist. Of course, this statement should not be necessary to make, but it is - it's a form of "don't shoot I'm on your side".

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