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PayPal terminates account of Epik, home to Proud Boys domain and Gab

mashable.com

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Re: PayPal terminates account of Epik, home to Proud Boys domain and Gab

#71

Post by gruez »

x86_64Ubuntu wrote: post #46
toomuchtodo wrote: post #29

Earlier 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…

So people should be able to send money abroad to terrorism outfits? I think you are taking the "money is speech" conservative position, and stretching it to its atomic limits.

>So people should be able to send money abroad to terrorism outfits

OP mentioned "if you're not breaking the law".

Re: PayPal terminates account of Epik, home to Proud Boys domain and Gab

#72

Post by kypro »

ceejayoz wrote: post #43
4bpp wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-m…

Providing services to groups like this can be a PR disaster far more revenue-impacting than having to mop a floor.

Providing services to African Americans and homosexuals would have been a PR disaster historically. You shouldn't be denied access to critical services like this because of unpopular political beliefs.

Honestly, it's worrying I even have to say this. It's utterly nuts people here are defending this.

Re: PayPal terminates account of Epik, home to Proud Boys domain and Gab

#73

Post by rndgermandude »

nojito wrote: post #11
patrickaljord wrote: post #8

Earlier 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…

These sites aren’t being banned for their views but their blatant disregard for the terms of services for providers.

Are they? Some may be, such as proud boys and dailystormer may be afoul of some (vague) hate speech clauses. Others may not be.

paypal and CC companies also shut down donations to wikileaks long ago (long before Trump was a thing). And even shut down donations to other foundations, such as the Wau Holland Stiftung of the Chaos Computer Club[0], that collected donations in part for wikileaks.

My first real memory of paypal was paypal shutting down the account we used to collect donations to cover server costs for a forum we ran back in the day[1], without any appeals process and freezing all assets, effectively stealing the money[2].

I also find it fascinating e.g. that cloudflare still protects botters (aka outright declared criminals) and people selling child porn[3] (aka the worst of common criminals), but dailystormer, as vile as they are, are somehow too much.

[0] German, https://netzpolitik.org/2010/wau-holland-stiftung-geht-gegen...

[1] the forums was a rather benign thing, just for chitchat, nobody sold anything, and it wasn't about anything illegal either. We never got an explanation from paypal, but the account shutdown coincided with a DMCA request for a single red carpet picture some user posted in a thread about the Emmy's. We removed that picture, by the way.

[2] Paypal wrote that they would refund the money, but some of our members reported they never did get a refund.

[3] I and some other people repeatedly reported a website selling child pornography for crypto (or for users submitting "original content"), mostly of the blackmailed-into-performing-lewd-acts variety targeting young teens and even pre-teens. While we had some success in getting domain registrars to nuke the domains in the past, this only lead to domain hopping, and finally the operator found a registrar that doesn't care (currently a Ukrainian company and .su/.pk domains). Every time the websites were behind cloudflare and every time cloudflare responded to our requests with "we're just a reverse proxy and forwarded it to the hoster" and didn't do anything. The current incarnations of those websites are still online a month later.

Re: PayPal terminates account of Epik, home to Proud Boys domain and Gab

#74

Post by some_furry »

ashtonkem wrote: post #67
freeone3000 wrote: post #31

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.

And yet this entire thing is going to turn into an ugly left vs. right culture war, even though this is probably more about KYC regulations.

Fortunately, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24894248

Re: PayPal terminates account of Epik, home to Proud Boys domain and Gab

#76

Post by ceejayoz »

kypro wrote: post #72
ceejayoz wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Providing services to groups like this can be a PR disaster far more revenue-impacting than having to mop a floor.

Providing services to African Americans and homosexuals would have been a PR disaster historically. You shouldn't be denied access to critical services like this because of unpopular political beliefs. Honestly, it's worrying I even have to say this. It's utterly nuts people here are defending this.

You can't stop being African American, and it's generally accepted that homosexuality is the same.

You can stop being a Proud Boy. If you look at what are deemed by law to be "protected classes", they are generally things that can't be readily changed - age, gender, disability, race.

Re: PayPal terminates account of Epik, home to Proud Boys domain and Gab

#77

Post by mmastrac »

gruez wrote: post #71
x86_64Ubuntu wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So people should be able to send money abroad to terrorism outfits? I think you are taking the "money is speech" conservative position, and stretching it to its atomic limits.

>So people should be able to send money abroad to terrorism outfits OP mentioned "if you're not breaking the law".

So free speech _does_ have limits?

Re: PayPal terminates account of Epik, home to Proud Boys domain and Gab

#78

Post by rndgermandude »

gruez wrote: post #24
virgil_disgr4ce wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"ties to the government?" Even if that were more than vague and nebulous, it's still not "actually the government." Private companies terminating accounts of their own volition is not censorship.

>Private companies terminating accounts of their own volition is not censorship. Are you conflating 1st amendment protections with "censorship"? Definition of censorship: >The use of state or group power to control freedom of expression or press, such as passing laws to prevent media from being published or propagated. (emphasis mine)

Indeed, companies may have the legal right to censor like this, but it's censorship regardless.

Re: PayPal terminates account of Epik, home to Proud Boys domain and Gab

#79

Post by ashtonkem »

dleslie wrote: post #25

To be clear: the domain registrar has been cut off. I doubt that Paypal is going to be consistent about this; _I suspect that_ illegal content and hate sites can be found in the registries of many major registrars. Still, it's a concerning development for anyone who may be using the same registration service as a future target. Edit: I missed that they are alleged to be laundering money.

They got cut off because they’re suspected to be laundering money, and couldn’t fill out AML forms, not because they host hate speech.

Re: PayPal terminates account of Epik, home to Proud Boys domain and Gab

#80

Post by microcolonel »

jacquesm wrote: post #64
microcolonel wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Proud Boys are not white supremacists. “Anti-racist” is brand of explicit racial discrimination dressed up as civil rights activism. And no, "we" would not "all be so much better off" for having licked Kendi's boot instead of upholding the sanctity of basic civil rights that enable the very activism (good or bad) that you're talking about.

> The Proud Boys are not white supremacists. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proud_Boys

If you're referring to the sentence containing “several members have been affiliated with white supremacy”, it kinda doesn't jive with the fact that their highest leadership position is filled by an afro-cuban man, and the fact that there is no official or de-facto-official Proud Boys public communication of anything regarding white supremacy other than condemnation of it, nor any official or sanctioned actions taken against visibly non-white groups or people.

I mean, if there were white supremacists in the Proud Boys, something that isn't even alleged in that article, surely they would not continue once the group was being led by a man who is like 25-75% black.

The only reason they are being framed so aggressively as white supremacists now, is that Joe Biden mentioned them on the debate stage. Rather than accounting for Joe Biden's ignorance or malice, the media preferred to alter public perception to justify his comments; and it looks like it sorta worked!

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