There is a difference between bank accounts, Visa/MasterCard access and Internet service, on one hand, and App Stores, Twitter accounts and payment providers, on the other hand. The First Amendment promises both free speech and free assembly. Core to the latter is the freedom not to assemble. This freedom is regulated. You can’t refuse to do business with protected classes. But political affiliation is not a protecte…
Stripe bans Trump campaign
221–230 of 1001 posts
Re: Stripe bans Trump campaign
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
The mob has been coming for law enforcement and federal buildings in many major cities in America for nine months now. This mob actively organized on Twitter and other social media. Where was the outrage in June? Most of the organizations that organized this destruction still have their Twitter accounts.
When you say "coming for law enforcement", do you mean actively advocating for violence toward, or just, like, advocating for additional regulation?
Or howabout permanently blinding some of the cops with lasers? Is that violent, or is that just asking for a funding change in the police department?
Re: Stripe bans Trump campaign
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Stripe and Twitter are pretty clearly the latter. They might be the latter, but I wouldn't consider it obvious. Regarding social media, we've gotten to the point where even US Visa applications ask for social media handles (and I understand they consider it as a negative datum if you don't provide one). And we're also at the point where some companies won't provide you with respectable service unless you @ them on…
Wasn't there a sort-of reverse issue a year or two ago, when the President was blocking people on twitter and a court ruled that he was violating their 1st amendment rights? Is it exclusively because of his office? Could it be construed the other direction?
https://www.cnn.com/2017/06/06/politics/trump-tweets-officia...
>Could it be construed the other direction?
No.
Re: Stripe bans Trump campaign
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
You could look at countries as being part of a market. If one country decides to ban your speech, you just move to another one, right? But that's not how it works because switching countries is very difficult. We demand free speech from a government even if we theoretically have the option to move. If you have a colluding oligopoly in something crucial to do business such as payments or communication, where it's diff…
Switching online payment providers isn't like moving to a new country, even a little bit.
Payment providers are just a front end for their networks, so it's easy to switch providers like Stripe, but you can still be banned by underlying network like Mastercard and your business will suffer.
Re: Stripe bans Trump campaign
#225Welcome to the shiny new age of totalitarian tolerance.
I’m a going to risk it.
Re: Stripe bans Trump campaign
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I’m fairly certain that attempting to overthrow the government to get your desired election result is fascism. I can't believe I'm actually going to go to this topic, but your argument has been made before with the Reichstag Fire [1]. Using threats of violence as a pretext for assuming more government control is a tactic as old as governments. > The Nazi Party used the fire as a pretext to claim that communists wer…
> I can't believe I'm actually going to go to this topic, but your argument has been made before with the Reichstag Fire [1]. Using threats of violence as a pretext for assuming more government control is a tactic as old as governments. There's a bit of false equivalence here. The fire was, on one hand, a false flag (from the very link you posted), and on the other hand, a stroke of luck. Whereas here, it was an atte…
And those 75M voters are not able to receive communication from a person they voted for and want to hear speak. They can't buy things from stores that are selling ordinary, run of the mill political apparel. The servers and apps providing social media--protected under section 230 just like AWS, Apple, and Google--have been banned.
It is not the extremists who are receiving the brunt of this purge.
Re: Stripe bans Trump campaign
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
Spare us your hypocrisy. A literal mob took over parts of Seattle and several government buildings. Hundreds of buildings have been burned or looted in the past year during protests. People were killed in the process. Did anybody think to deplatform the Biden campaign? No, we did not - and rightly so. We accepted their condemnation of violence just as we should accept that of Trump and his campaign.
Biden decried the violence in Seattle. Trump encouraged this riot, and may have even purposefully slowed down the authorization to send in the National Guard. You don’t get to call me a hypocrite based on stuff you’ve made up.
Re: Stripe bans Trump campaign
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because if you block 'bad' opinions, you'll need to arbiter them to distinguish bad ones from good. This process is corruptible and eventually you'll find that opposing a current government is 'bad' (this happened in my country in a short span of 15 years). So it turns out that allowing all speech, even 'bad' is less harmful for society in the long run than trying to suppress some speech.
No. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
If you carve yourself an exemption to not accept some behaviour or beliefs, you are no longer tolerant. And you still think that you are, it's just a hypocrisy.
Re: Stripe bans Trump campaign
#229Freedom of speech, you cry. Well, OK, this is freedom of speech…for Stripe. They don’t like what Trump has done. They are a private company. It’s their ball. They can take it home whenever they want to. Speech has consequences, and if you foment a hostile takeover of Congress, you pay your price.
This argument went out the window when Amazon started infrastructure bans. "Build your own..." What? Internet? Country?
Re: Stripe bans Trump campaign
#230There is a difference between bank accounts, Visa/MasterCard access and Internet service, on one hand, and App Stores, Twitter accounts and payment providers, on the other hand. The First Amendment promises both free speech and free assembly. Core to the latter is the freedom not to assemble. This freedom is regulated. You can’t refuse to do business with protected classes. But political affiliation is not a protecte…
> You can’t refuse to do business with protected classes. But political affiliation is not a protected class. FYI, political affiliation is protected from discrimination in CA, NY, and DC. https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/can-employers-discri...
Lawful political activity is protected from workplace discrimination. That’s a far stretch from making it a general protected class, and wouldn’t prevent Stripe from refusing to work with the Trump campaign.