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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

#471

Post by heagrees »

40acres wrote: post #110
nkurz wrote: post #69

The article avoids the specifics of what Benjamin said, which makes it hard to judge whether Patreon is acting reasonably. The interview in question is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQ87Wf-0rZg . Here are some excerpts from the automatically generated transcript (click the 3 dots, then "Open transcript"): I just can't be bothered to deal with people who treat me like this it's really annoying like I you are a…

A lot of times in these discussions folks like to abstract the actual instance that causes a controversy like this and instead change the conversation to rant about political correctness, centralization, and free speech. If you wrote what this guy wrote in an email at your job you would be fired on the spot, it doesn't matter who you worked for or what industry. No one would be able to get away with this kind of spee…

[dead]

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

#472

Post by dgudkov »

justin66 wrote: post #318
dgudkov wrote: post #248

The missing question here -- why did Patreon do it? Is it because they are afraid of legal risk of not being able to defend themselves against a lawsuit? Or they are afraid of loss of revenue/capitalization if an online activist group launches a shame/smear campaign? Or it simply because it rubbed the wrong way someone in the company management? Why did they do it?

This doesn't seem like a big mystery. It would not take a smear campaign or some kind of major boycott to cost a company that became too closely associated in the public imagination with alt-right whackjobs.

Too closely - meaning having a customer that said the N-word somewhere? I'm not picky, just trying to understand what "too closely" means in your answer.

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

#473

Post by SolaceQuantum »

krapp wrote: post #466
SolaceQuantum wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m confused why patreons behavior is newly unacceptable in a way that sparks controversy. I agree that it is likely a problem overall, but I don’t understand what has occurred that has made it new to discuss.

>I don’t understand what has occurred that has made it new to discuss. A lot of people in the tech community and on HN sympathize with the ideology of people being deplatformed, particularly regarding alt-right and "anti-feminist" views.

Yes, but people have been deplatformed in the past, and are quite normally deplatformed for saying and doing socially unacceptable things outside of the platform. Plenty of news anchors get booted off for going on racist twitter rants or whatever. I fundamentally don’t understand the difference between this and booting someone from patreon for what they said on YouTube. I agree this is a problem- I don’t understand why this is a significantly new problem worthy of heated discussion.

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

#474

Post by root_axis »

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…

I think you're way way way overthinking this. The bottom line is that an online service can ban any user for any reason, period. Just because a service is popular doesn't mean that you have a right to use it. If you don't like how a company operates their business, then you can start a boycott or use a competitor.

> the world handing them the reigns.

Nobody is handing anyone the reigns. Patreon didn't even exist a few years ago, and now we're debating whether or not free speech is in peril because someone was banned from it. It's the same thing with people who get incensed over twitter bans... who cares? These are just arbitrary business... these things just don't really matter.

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

#475

Post by daverobbins1 »

daverobbins1 wrote: post #36
apk-d wrote: 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.

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

Typo: I meant “doesn’t allow people like this guy to exist”.

Society should chew up and spit out anyone who’s world view is based on hate and racism.

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

#476

Post by anotherevan »

As a thought experiment, I wonder what the reactions would be if, instead of barring objectionable creators, they instead forego their 5% cut and instead donate it to a charity or cause that is opposite to the creator's ideology.

In the interests of full transparency, they would have to include a notice on the top of the creator's page...

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

#477

Post by yesco »

ubernostrum wrote: post #427
yesco wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Would you like the government to come force me at gunpoint to let him use my soapbox? That's easy, are you the only one with that soapbox? Do you own all the soapboxes? Are you a Corporation who is taking advantage of it's market dominance and near monopoly on modern free association to control public discourse? So yes if your soapbox networks are now an integral part of public debate then the government should eit…

So to prevent an angry mob from taking away someone's platform, you insist we need the ability for an angry mob to take away someone's platform. I think you need to think this through a bit more.

> to prevent an angry mob from taking away someone's platform

What? My reply had nothing to do with defending platforms from angry mobs. To reiterate in case you are misunderstanding something, if a company fits the criteria I stated in my previous reply (aka companies like Google/Alphabet) then it should be either regulated or nationalized.

So no, nothing about preventing angry mobs from taking over someone's platform. Unless you consider the government regulating businesses who are abusing their monopoly on public discourse to be an angry mob.

Honestly can't tell if you are trying to make a weird gotcha here or flat out replied to the wrong post.

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

#478

Post by toofy »

coffeemug wrote: post #409
toofy wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If these norms continue to getting eroded, god help us all — it may set humanity and the western civilization back by hundreds of years. Haven’t these norms already been well established? I mean, almost every business which deals in exposure to humans sensory inputs has always seemed to have standards. Concert venues, magazines, record companies, night clubs with stages, publishing outlets etc etc... all of these b…

I just made an argument about that here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18765494 . > The difference is that the internet has discontinuously more scalable network effects, so technology companies often find themselves in a winner-takes-all dynamic. If some publisher, newspaper, or literary magazine refused to publish Walt Whitman, he could always try and find another publisher. But if Twitter bans Titania McGra…

Again, this seems to have been the norm. There have always been venue operators or publishers who have a significantly larger audience than their tiny similars. If Emma the Anarchist wanted to be published in the early 20th century, she wasn’t being published by the era’s Wall Street Journal, she was published in small homegrown publications.

I mean, I do recognize the scalability and network effects, but I’m still not convinced it is any different from the distant past or the recent past.

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

#479

Post by krapp »

PeterisP wrote: post #470
pavel_lishin wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By saying that they, and I quote Mr. Benjamin here: > "White people are meant to be polite and respectful to one another, and you guys can’t even act like white people, it’s really amazing to me." That sure sounds like someone who espouses a racial ideology to me, even if he hates other people who put on the nazi emblem.

The Borat movie has the protagonist sing a song "Throw the Jew down the well". Should that movie be considered antisemitic?

It is antisemitic in universe, and it's obviously a parody of antisemitic behavior. Comedy and parody typically get a pass on offensive behavior, particularly when the offender is being mocked and the language is being used as criticism (see racist and antisemitic content in Mel Brooks films, for example.) Some people probably do find Borat offensive, and Mel Brooks, regardless.

But I think the mistake your comment makes is trying to find an objective definition to judge a subjective behavior, trying to determine whether people should find something antisemitic, regardless of the context. But sometimes context does matter and you can't really control who gets offended at what, or judge what offense is "legitimate" and what isn't, based on some arbitrary criteria.

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

#480

Post by doubleunplussed »

beat wrote: post #289
zaroth wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything about your response I agree with except the tongue-in-cheek “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...” The reality is no, there is enough privatized centralization in payment and networks that certain companies can choose not to do business with someone, based on otherwise legal spe…

Business itself is inherently amoral (not evil, just lacking any sense of morality one way or another). Businesses don't refuse particular customers out of a sense of social justice - they do it because continuing to service their customers harms their reputation, and thus their business. I know I don't want to do business with businesses that tell me fascism is just "speech", and I'll go to their competitors instead…

Why are some businesses supposedly exposed to reputational risk of this sort but not others? Is Bank of America damaging their reputation by allowing famous but unpleasant people to use their service?
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