They chose to not participate with PayPal, and invent their own currency, and in exchange, PayPal stopped dealing with them. Their questions were fairly basic KYC form-letter questions anyone selling a financial service should be able to answer - if they couldn't, they might be in trouble with the SEC, not just PayPal.
PayPal terminates account of Epik, home to Proud Boys domain and Gab
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Re: PayPal terminates account of Epik, home to Proud Boys domain and Gab
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
Look, if you get a reputation for entering businesses and shitting on the floor, you'll find yourself banned from all of them eventually. The same is true for online businesses.
Money is speech, so says the supreme court (Citizens United). Impeding the transfer of fiat (infra which should be a utility) is a violation of constitutional rights (arguably) if you're not breaking the law. Even if I disagree with the speech (I do! Vehemently!), rights must be inalienable. Maybe this should be patched in Section 230 legislation versus 18 USC § 1960, would have to read more statute to provide a prop…
SCOTUS has also ruled companies and people have a right to free association, with the exception of discrimination based on a protected class.
Proud Boys are not a protected class.
Re: PayPal terminates account of Epik, home to Proud Boys domain and Gab
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
Look, if you get a reputation for entering businesses and shitting on the floor, you'll find yourself banned from all of them eventually. The same is true for online businesses.
Money is speech, so says the supreme court (Citizens United). Impeding the transfer of fiat (infra which should be a utility) is a violation of constitutional rights (arguably) if you're not breaking the law. Even if I disagree with the speech (I do! Vehemently!), rights must be inalienable. Maybe this should be patched in Section 230 legislation versus 18 USC § 1960, would have to read more statute to provide a prop…
Impeding the transfer of money by government law might be a constitutional violation. So they could use the postal service to take cash.
Re: PayPal terminates account of Epik, home to Proud Boys domain and Gab
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
Money is speech, so says the supreme court (Citizens United). Impeding the transfer of fiat (infra which should be a utility) is a violation of constitutional rights (arguably) if you're not breaking the law. Even if I disagree with the speech (I do! Vehemently!), rights must be inalienable. Maybe this should be patched in Section 230 legislation versus 18 USC § 1960, would have to read more statute to provide a prop…
SCOTUS has also ruled companies and people have a right to free association , with the exception of discrimination based on a protected class. Proud Boys are not a protected class.
Up for revisiting if another case makes it to SCOTUS once it tilts conservative with Barrett's confirmation.
Re: PayPal terminates account of Epik, home to Proud Boys domain and Gab
#35If some of y'all put the time you spent into defending white supremacists and hate platforms in the name of free speech or independent thought instead into achieving a more just, anti-racist society we'd all be so much better off.
Re: PayPal terminates account of Epik, home to Proud Boys domain and Gab
#36Good.
Re: PayPal terminates account of Epik, home to Proud Boys domain and Gab
#37In the coming years, we may see the rise of separate economies based on political divide. I think this is where we are heading, and this will counterpart the world splitting the internet into nationally divided fragments.
Without Visa, Mastercard or Paypal on the other side how can it survive? Cryptocurrencies as the current niche are hanging on, I suspect for as long as VMP permit them (ie buying bitcoin with a credit card). Everyone else, even Apple, go through them.
> Without Visa, Mastercard or Paypal on the other side how can it survive?
Bank transfer?
Re: PayPal terminates account of Epik, home to Proud Boys domain and Gab
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
SCOTUS has also ruled companies and people have a right to free association , with the exception of discrimination based on a protected class. Proud Boys are not a protected class.
Up for revisiting if another case makes it to SCOTUS once it tilts conservative with Barrett's confirmation.
"Companies should be able to reject customers" is the conservative position, in cases like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masterpiece_Cakeshop_v._Colora.... It's likely to tilt more in that direction, not less.
Re: PayPal terminates account of Epik, home to Proud Boys domain and Gab
#39Is this the same PayPal getting into cryptocurrencies? If Sathoshi were dead they would be rolling in their graves now.
Re: PayPal terminates account of Epik, home to Proud Boys domain and Gab
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, I mean, when they were banned from twitter, people said "build your own twitter", when they built gab and got banned from credit cards processors they said "build your own financial system", when they got banned from cloudflare they were told "build your own internet backbone" etc... At which point this is not censorship when companies equivalent to public infra with big public contracts and ties to the governm…
Look, if you get a reputation for entering businesses and shitting on the floor, you'll find yourself banned from all of them eventually. The same is true for online businesses.
How does this analogy work?
As I understand it, the reason a physical business would ban someone engaging in the behaviour you described is that it would create costly first-order work for the business (cleaning up) and result in a second-order loss of profits due to deterring other customers until the cleanup is complete. Does anything of the sort apply in the case of politically questionable entities using a near-monopolist payment processor to process payments?