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Patreon Bars Anti-Feminist for Racist Speech, Inciting Revolt

nytimes.com

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

#131
I don't see if it's mention in this article (there's a hard paywall), but notably Sam Harris, among other things previously one of the top authors on Patreon, quit the platform over this incident.

His own explanation for why starts around 5 minutes into this podcast: https://samharris.org/podcasts/drive-interview-peter-attia/

Briefly, while he doesn't defend what Carl Benjamin said, he himself feels he can't financially rely on a platform that boots controversial authors from the platform.

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

#132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good question. I've found a transcript published by patreon: https://patreonhq.com/hate-speech-on-patreon-a9026e52c2cf?gi... It's... pretty vitriolic. I'm not totally comfortable with even quoting the redacted version, but here goes nothing: > “I just can’t be bothered with people who chose to treat me like this. It’s really annoying. Like, I — . You’re acting like a bunch of n_____s, just so you know. You act like w…

Reading this as a straight white guy, the slurs aren't as offensive as the whole underlying philosophy and line of thinking. Although I like that the No True Scotsman fallacy leaking through the cracks.

The slurs seem more like a natural symptom of him thinking that black people act subhuman.

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

#133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Not really worrying. Just different individuals and organizations taking different positions on different subjects. Most importantly, all of it happening on private property. I have an unpopular opinion. I believe people should be able to fly nazi and confederate flags on their private property. (Even if their private property overlooks yours.) I believe football players should be able to kneel during the national an…

> All of these are just people having opinions. If you don't like their opinions, don't associate with them. That's the freedom that you have.

At the risk of starting a tangent, this doesn't work when it comes to business. Businesses (or any relationship of dependency) should not be allowed to have "an opinion" because before long it becomes collusion and shunning.

How well did "no, no, you have the freedom to go somewhere else" work for blacks just wanting to buy a hamburger in America pre-1968? We had to pass laws telling businesses to get the fuck over themselves and indeed, it's still challenged to this day when gays try to buy wedding cakes.

If you don't like mandatory arbitration clauses in every single contract you sign, you literally can't do business anywhere. Everything from your job to your car purchase has them. If you don't like being subjected to credit checks, you literally cannot procure the utilities required by law to make your dwelling inhabitable-- all utilities run credit or make it prohibitively expensive to go without.

It's an imbalance of power. You can't just "go somewhere else" when you depend on the service being offered or provided, that you are denied for arbitrary reasons.

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

#134
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our descendants are going to be seriously confused by our practice of limiting or taking away people's ability to earn money because they publicly used a wrong word. Or so I hope, at least.

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.

But then what do you think of the McCarthy era, when private companies (Hollywood majors) wouldn't touch someone who was suspected of communism, making it impossible for them to find work?

By your standards it's all OK, because it's not the government?

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

#135
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, yeah, that's bad. He's not even mentioning the words, he's just using them against white people instead of black, but the way he uses them is still meant as an insult. Oops.

But it would be ok if he were black, right? After all, black people are free to use the n-word at will...

You believe it’s an unfair privilege that they have?

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

#136

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 argue that by your own ideal state of decentralization, the current system should be working perfectly fine for you regardless of private companies censoring X, Y, and Z.

The "fully decentralized" internet can (does?) already currently exist today alongside our usual youtube/facebook/cloudflare/etc centralized internet. The state of centralization is entirely by user choice, not by force.

Literally the only necessary component for a decentralized internet is net neutrality - that packets are delivered without systematic blocking or throttling on the basis of content. And net neutrality, while in danger, hasn't AFAIK devolved to blocking sites for objectionable content (not yet in the west anyways)

In other words, theres a very clear answer to your conundrum of "at what point do we accept that we have different viewpoints and live and let live?". Regardless of political views or whatever else, your content ought to be routable on the internet. Everything else that we as a society have built on top of that (edge caching, content platforms, delivery systems, heck throw in DNS while we're at it) are unnecessary for a decentralized internet, so if you piss off society and nobody wants to do business with you, maybe it's fine if you're on your own.

Of course, you also argue "there are problems that people have, and things that need to be talked about, but they aren't allowed to say anything about it". That's an understandable position, but should be considered unrelated to the issue of centralized vs decentralized -- I would still not want to argue with some race-baiting troll, even if I hosted my own content instead of uploading it to youtube. I would still ban them, ignore them, blacklist them, or whatever options exist in the decentralized internet.

>The societal norms are shifting to a place where there are certain topics that are not allowed to be discussed at all even if looking at them from a critical lens

This isn't really any different from the majority of human history. Private speech - available through a text message or a DM - is still pretty unregulated (and likely will remain that way - for example iMessage is end-to-end encrypted and I suspect any chat service that moderates private messages would run into issues maintaining users). Public speech has always been heavily regulated by those who hold power - whether it's the FCC regulating TV content or being snubbed from the community when you advocate a particularly unsavory opinion at a town gathering.

So then maybe the problem is that more and more of our speech is "public speech" (like a facebook post) and not "private speech" (like a facebook direct message), and hence in practice more and more speech is being censored. I could agree with this. But that's neither a centralization problem nor a censorship problem.

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

#137
post #65

It's also worth considering that the Alt-Right has been deliberately working to get more popular moderate figures like Sargon kicked off of mainstream platforms, so they'll be forced to move (and bring their audiences) to Alt-Right platforms: https://twitter.com/crislopezg/status/969225740540678145

I hope they succeed, because they'll just end up isolating themselves to their own little echo chambers, sparing the rest of us from having to hear their drivel.

[deleted]

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

#138
post #53

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 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…

I'm always a bit surprised by people who want to bring up historical analogies without admitting that the US has a long history of censorship; if anything, the type of hard-line free-speech stance assumed by many internet forum posters is an incredibly recent development in American law. And both public (enforced by law) and private (enforced by industry associations or the like) censorship regimes continue to exist in the US today.

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

#139

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…

Yes, "The idea of free speech predates the existence of the United States."

The idea of the freedom of association also predates the existence of the United States.

The freedom of association means that organizations get to exclude people from the association. Including because of their speech.

The phrase 'deplatform' rejects of the freedom of association.

Quoting from John Stuart Mill's "On Liberty", chapter IV, "Of the Limits to the Authority of Society Over the Individual"

> It would be a great misunderstanding of this doctrine, to suppose that it is one of selfish indifference, which pretends that human beings have no business with each other's conduct in life, and that they should not concern themselves about the well-doing or well-being of one another, unless their own interest is involved. ...

> We have a right, also, in various ways, to act upon our unfavourable opinion of any one, not to the oppression of his individuality, but in the exercise of ours. We are not bound, for example, to seek his society; we have a right to avoid it (though not to parade the avoidance), for we have a right to choose the society most acceptable to us. We have a right, and it may be our duty, to caution others against him, if we think his example or conversation likely to have a pernicious effect on those with whom he associates. We may give others a preference over him in optional good offices, except those which tend to his improvement. In these various modes a person may suffer very severe penalties at the hands of others, for faults which directly concern only himself; but he suffers these penalties only in so far as they are the natural, and, as it were, the spontaneous consequences of the faults themselves, not because they are purposely inflicted on him for the sake of punishment.

It is indeed possible "to extend the bounds of what may be called moral police, until it encroaches on the most unquestionably legitimate liberty of the individual", but what I'm pointing out is that you cannot simply look at "freedom of speech" as the sole or even paramount freedom under discussion.

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

#140

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 choose to see it as an opportunity for the players that wish to take on the challenge of providing another platform that will cater to those who wish to pay for a given service without concern for the information being posted, assuming it does not violate the values behind the Golden Rule. As long as there is no coercion, let people come to their own agreements.

I appreciate free speech, it allows me to read/hear opposing viewpoints so I can reevaluate what I currently believe so I can make sure I still have confidence in my chosen belief systems.

This is why I will make the time to talk to people of faith different than mine, as well as why I pay attention to news/conversations from other countries, as well as differing political parties in my own country (USA).

I enjoy critical thinking, and it can only be done thoroughly with ample sources of data.

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