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Patreon Bars Anti-Feminist for Racist Speech, Inciting Revolt

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31–40 of 789 posts

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

#31
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.

No, the 1st Amendment attempts to protect this valuable thing in the same way that the 21st Amendment protects your booze supply.

Free speech is a much bigger, and older, idea. And can be seriously threatened by many small changes in our public culture, which need not have anything to do with Washington.

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

#32
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.

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.

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

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

I guess I don't have a problem with people deciding what messages they do and do not want to support, as much as I have a larger problem with the rest of the world handing them the reigns.

Centralization is the real evil, here. Why are we giving companies and people the right to silence vast amounts of voices and opinions on random whims?

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 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. So, there are problems that people have, and things that need to be talked about, but they aren't allowed to say anything about it. They can only reference the idea from some distant euphemism.

The ones that do use their voices are banished to the shadows where, not only do they not stop thinking and saying what they were before, but now they dig their heels in further. They spread out to forums that will have them, and incidentally tend to allow hate speech or inciting violence. So we're taking the ideas we do not find palatable and sending them off to a distant land where the other bad ideas go to twist and tear and fester and rot.

To me, personally and anecdotally, this seems to be happening with increasing velocity. We're tightening our grip on what speech is acceptable and using centralized services to force this control on ourselves, over a platform that has always been about the open exchange of ideas.

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 certainly think Net Neutrality is essential at this point, whether enforced via public infrastructure or some kind of over-arching regulation. But, there's not much anyone can do in the current framework of things other than encourage decentralization. And I do, when I can.

Also, for the record, I'm a feminist, left-leaning socialist. So good luck writing me off as another conservative windbag who doesn't understand the first amendment that's crowing about censorship. I think censorship is a problem, whether it's via private platforms or not.

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

#34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's simply amoral to try and cutoff someone's living and censor them just because the way they said something wasn't to your liking Would it be immoral (or amoral, either one) of my employer to fire me employed if I gave a tech talk and started throwing the N-word around? Patreon has fairly clear rules on behavior; they're not obligated to keep anyone as their client if they start breaking them.

According to what I've heard, those clear rules state that they apply to what is said as part of work that is funded by Patreon. This could be misinformation, though, and I'd be happy if someone corrects it here. With that in mind, he made the remarks in question during a conversation that took place on somebody else's YouTube channel. It sounds like Patreon presumes that the guy's patronized work includes all public…

I'm not sure why people expect platforms that have ToS to be robotic about them. Companies are run by people. People get uncomfortable when you become known for spraying around racial epithets, and some are not going to want to work with you.

If I'm using some vendor and find out that I really don't like what their public persona is doing, I'm going to reevaluate that relationship.

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

#35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> taking away people's ability to earn money On a single platform. Nobody's preventing Mr. Benjamin from making money; they're just not allowing him to use one specific platform. He's welcome to sign up for Hatreon, or to use a payment processor directly.

And when the new payment company bans him, then what? And are you OK if Twitter bans all left leaning people just because of their beliefs? I tend to favor the smallest government possible, because I think private companies tend to do a better work in many areas (not all of them) so I dont like government intervening. But when you have an almost defacto monopoly in certain areas (google, facebook, twitter) banning pe…

> And when the new payment company bans him, then what?

Then he'll learn a valuable lesson about what is and isn't owed to him in life. Why do you suppose that the world owes everyone a soapbox that dispenses money?

> And are you OK if Twitter bans all left leaning people just because of their beliefs?

I'd be miffed, but that's their right. For example, it seems like Tumblr is making almost that exact mistake, as did Livejournal before them. I'm annoyed by it, but in the end it's their court and all I can do is shake my head, take my ball, and head home.

> But when you have an almost defacto monopoly in certain areas (google, facebook, twitter) banning people who has not broken the law should be illegal, plain and simple.

Patreon isn't on that list, so I assume that your small-government philosophy allows for them to stop supporting Mr. Benjamin and his cohorts.

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

#36
post #5
post #2

The real meat of the racist speech: > "This month, the site’s moderators received a complaint about Mr. Benjamin, who had risen to fame railing against diversity and feminism during the GamerGate movement in 2014. Mr. Benjamin used the N-word and anti-gay language during an interview posted to YouTube on Feb. 7, Patreon found." I could be wrong, but I'm under the impression Benjamin used that word to insult white sup…

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.

Hopefully our descendants are more confused by how we failed to get society to a place that allows people like this guy to exist.

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

#37
post #28

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.

Free speech as a concept has been around for a lot longer than the US government. The problem is if free speech is effectively banned from the internet due to the internet being controlled by a handful of private companies, do we still have free speech?

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

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

#38

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?

Keep in mind that some of those viewpoints are "we live, others get eradicated".

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

#39
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.

> taking away people's ability to earn money On a single platform. Nobody's preventing Mr. Benjamin from making money; they're just not allowing him to use one specific platform. He's welcome to sign up for Hatreon, or to use a payment processor directly.

One does not simply use a payment processor directly. Stripe and PayPal both deplatformed within a week the Patreon alternative that the guy went to after being kicked off Patreon (SubscribeStar). Hatreon was also deplatformed by their payment processor, as noted below. In another recent instance, MasterCard demanded that Patreon kick off another person for political reasons [1]. Social network Gab is now accepting USD payments only by mailed check for their premium tier. Of course, the pioneer modern instance of being financially deplatformed was Wikileaks, who was deplatformed by both Visa and MasterCard for political reasons. I've gained a new respect for Bitcoin from this incident. If you can't digitally send USD to another person to do legal things, USD has a problem.

[1] https://twitter.com/Patreon/status/1029551216886341634

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

#40

Looks like this guy is from Europe. Do they have the same stigma for those words? Are we okay applying American standards to their words? That would be a slippery slope. Some nations consider speech against their sultans or their deens as hate speech. Will patreon take the side of those governments or the vast majority of those populations (who will gladly watch blasphemers get imprisoned)? On the other hand, should…

From the context, it seems he was using the words because he knew they were offensive. Also maybe that excuse works for ESL Europeans, but I'm not very convinced it works for somebody who's British.
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