Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Patreon Bars Anti-Feminist for Racist Speech, Inciting Revolt

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 789 posts

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

#111

Post by aetherson »

losvedir wrote: post #67
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…

> Or Visa likewise today -- it's understood that other people will use the same plastic to pay for things you morally disapprove of, just as they could use cash. But it's positioned as a neutral carrier, and nobody cares (I think). Heh, well I hope so. But that recent NYTimes story[0] about how mass shootings used guns and ammo bought with a credit card makes me unsure about that. I'd have thought using cash vs credi…

I was reading some tangential article the other day which suggested that porn services had difficulty with Visa not doing business with them.

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

#112

Post by Sir_Substance »

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…

>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 policies that aren't selectively enforced, I think it becomes worrisome.

In fairness, that was actually DS's fault. They went and said "everyone else has banned us, but cloudflare hasn't. Cloudflare agree with what we stand for".

Cloudflares CEO responded by saying "It would be an objectivly bad thing for the world if I used my position as CEO of cloudflare to censor information and opinions. However, if DS's public standpoint is that if I'm not against them I must be with them, then I'm /definitely/ against them".

I think that's reasonable enough, it's pretty cheeky for DS to attempt to usurp cloudflares good name, and totally appropriate for cloudflare to push them under a bus as a response.

>So what do we do? I don't know. Privately-owned services should be free to censor. People should also continue to speak freely (if legal).

I wrote a long version of an answer to this, but it started to ramble a lot. Short version: once someone has 50% of the planet as a customer base, as facebook does, they're not a private company any more, they're a public utility. Even with a much smaller userbase, a company could be acting like a public utility in some countries. We should drop regulation and auditing on them like a tonne of bricks, same as we do other de-facto monopolies like the tax department. If companies don't want that, they should work to generate a marketplace of options for customers.

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

#114

Post by consp »

evil-olive wrote: post #78
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…

> 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 customers wouldn't feel tainted. Bell in its monopoly days was a common carrier [0], regulated by law to treat all phone lines equally. > Or Visa likewise today -- it's understood that other people will…

>> ... types who are generally skeptical of government regulation of business.

Isn't businesses deciding what they want exactly less regulation?

The line they are walking is pretty thin at Patreon but my image of the company is mostly supporting general content creators in the non-ideological spectrum of content. If these people do not fit with their point of view (specified in general in the terms) they may simply be polishing up their image to what they want to look like. It is their choice as they throw away some, at this point still marginal, income. Though as stated in the article, the people leaving could use it as a rallying point and maybe even get out better in the end (subscriber/monetary wise).

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

#115

Post by iguy »

rabidrat wrote: post #73
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…

Bell Telephone was a peer-to-peer communications infrastructure, not a publishing platform. To the extent that it did provide a medium for publication (the phonebook), they absolutely had standards for what could be published. Were those standards arbitrary? Was the Jewish Defamation League allowed to have their business listed, or advertise?

Part of this is that we haven't quite figured out what "publishing platform" means. It's not like a printing press (renting time on machine which applies ink) but also not like a magazine (with an editor pushing a view, his name on page 2). Facebook certainly carries a lot of peer-to-peer communications, but wades deep into deciding what's acceptable. Yet unlike magazines, which were always numerous, they have something close to a monopoly.

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

#116

Post by thelasthuman »

throwawaysea wrote: post #77

I don't understand why commenters in these threads keep noting that free speech only protects people from government censorship. This is a common, distracting, and empty statement. Proponents of free speech are pro free speech as a general concept and principle, beyond what protections are afforded under American law today. The idea of free speech predates the existence of the United States. Free speech is hugely val…

"The big risk is this: when only a few entities funnel so much societal discourse or control our communication infrastructure or process payments, those entities making arbitrary decisions about who they serve has similar impacts/risks to the government imposing similar restrictions through the law."

So the problem isn't kicking haters off a private platform, it's that corporations have grown to large.

I agree.

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

#117

Post by ryandrake »

ng12 wrote: post #56
pavel_lishin wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's stay on topic here; being banned from Patreon doesn't limit his speech at all.

But what happens when Patreon, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Reddit, Twitch and PayPal all work together to create collective censorship? Is your speech being limited if you're functionally blocked from the meaningfully accessible parts of the internet? Yes, these are all private companies. In fact someone already tried to create an alternative Patreon (called Hatreon, iirc) that was shut down by Visa. Allowing censors…

What happens is what's already happening: These platforms start becoming less and less diverse echo chambers where only Silicon Valley approved opinions and world views are allowed, and people who do not hold those opinions or views go off and find alternative services, further isolating people from each other, into their own ideological rabbit holes.

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

#118

Post by danso »

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…

> Then you see counter-arguments, like "well if you don't want to get banned, don't say bad things!" But then, who decides what's bad?

The people who run the platform?

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

#119

Post by zimpenfish »

harimau777 wrote: post #32
endisukaj wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The right to free speech protects you from being persecuted by the government. Patreon and any other private company reserve the right to choose their customers (and workers) based on what they say. This has always been the case. There are countless examples, even in the past, where companies have fired employees for saying things they shouldn't have.

As I see it, a functional democracy requires tolerance of unpopular opinions not just by the government but also by society at large. I don't agree with these sorts of statements, but I believe that censoring them is harmful to society.

> a functional democracy requires tolerance of unpopular opinions not just by the government but also by society at large

If you insert "some" before "unpopular", I'm with you. If you require "all" before "unpopular", then no, I disagree - e.g. people who believe "LGBTQ people should be done away" with, well, that's an "unpopular opinion" that should not be tolerated and, in fact, should be made anathema for anyone to express.

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

#120

Post by zamalek »

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 them out. That includes being allowed to throw a loud ranting racist out of a, say, pub or a website.

These individuals are free to create their own businesses and websites which facilitate whatever kind of discourse they please, nobody can take that away from them (unless they venture into fighting words). They, however, seem to want to be where their ideas are not wanted[1].

Patreon would likely be happy to have a conservative on their website if the primary concern of the content was not intolerance.

> I'm torn about this.

Karl Popper helps clear it up[2]. His wording surrounding FoS is particularly illuminating because it doesn't specifically calling out left-extremists or right-extremists; both have been pretty awful about attacking speech, especially the escalation over the past few years.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vote_brigading [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

Post reply on HN