Patreon Bars Anti-Feminist for Racist Speech, Inciting Revolt

I am saying essentially that; there should be a law that forces Patreon and other companies (those oligarchic payment processors, Google, Facebook, twitter, etc) which basically qualify as utility companies to allow people on their platform, unless those people abuse(d) those platforms for severe unlawful activities (crimes). Or they should lose their service provider status and all those "safe harbor" exceptions that come with it, e.g. DMCA safe harbor.

Same as the your local electricity provider (probably a monopoly in your area; tho you can always run a generator aka your "soapbox" pendant all those comments in here are talking about :p) should not be allowed to stop serving you because you wrote a blog ranting about their bad customer service.

I am also saying: Companies are not people, and (their) money is not speech, and I'm all for limiting companies' "free speech" in that their "free speech" cannot discriminate other people. Companies are already limited that way anyway to a degree, be it anti-discrimination legislation when it comes to the work place or the current state of "protected classes" on which they may not base a refusal of service.

They do have to be here to be voted down, though. But they show up often enough in threads that deviate into gender politics (particularly as regards hiring and women in tech,) gender biology and, unsurprisingly, feminism. And codes of conduct. For some weird reason, a lot of people seem to believe software codes of conduct are a feminist conspiracy.

How is immunodeficiency treatment at all related to deplatforming? Viruses aren't thinking human beings.

> Do civil rights movements cause racism?

The Civil Rights movement did not enagage in deplatforming. Many of them explicitly acknowledged that their opponents also deserve the ability to speak. It was often the civil Rights movement itself that was subject to deplatforming.

> Of course it's going to co-occur with the thing it's attempting to treat. This is evidence of nothing at all.

The rise of deplatforming preceded the rise of the Alt Right by about a year or two. They didn't always co-occur, one preceded the other. Their continued co-occurrence suggests that the implementation of deplatforming either 1. has no effect on that brand of extremist, or 2. maybe even causes it.

This is not consistent with treating a disease. Usually, a disease is present sometime before treatment is administered. Then as treatment is administered the symptoms are reduced, if the treatment is successful. This is not what we are witnessing with the relationship between deplatforming and the brand of right wing extremism we've been seeing lately.

> What you need to do, and what the studies I reference did do, is examine individual communities pre and post treatment.

Limiting measurement to individual communities is not a good way to measur it's overall effect. Again pointing out the fact that when a community deplatforms a certain view that view is no longer present is pointing out an obvious consequence. Of course the platform sees a reduction in the view that was deplatformed. That's basically just restating the definition of deplatforming: kicking a person or group off the platform.

If you want to measure the effect of deplatforming on society, then the analysis has to be society-wide. Otherwise one is effectively just building a bubble of the communities that do engage in deplatforming, and burying their head with respect to it's impact on the rest of society.

In the subject being discussed, the two actors are Patreon and far-right commentators. In the metaphor, presumably Murrow stands in for Patreon, and McCarthy stands in for contemporary far-right commentators.

What I presumed to be your point is that a commitment to pluralism, as manifested by Murrow giving McCarthy a platform, would be good because McCarthy would expose his whole ass on television and so be embarrassed out of public life. I took it to be the case that you were drawing the historical parallel because everyone knows how McCarthy's story ends and so people who want a similar ending for Carl Benjamin should take note.

But I don't understand the metaphor. McCarthy wasn't hoist by his own petard, he was deplatformed. That is to say that the thing that made him irrelevant was not the public becoming deeply convinced his ideas were wrong, but elites who gatekept his access to a public platform voluntarily deplatforming him. The Senate censured him. After the censure, no one worked with him in the Senate, or talked to him. The news stopped covering him, and the bureaucracy stopped returning his phone calls. He eventually went away because everyone ignored him. In the metaphor, if we want to learn from McCarthy how to make assholes go away today, the takeaway would be to deplatform them. I agree this is a valuable historical lesson.

If that was not the point, then I assumed perhaps a secondary point was that Murrow giving McCarthy a platform was good for a commitment to pluralism -- i.e. people should be able to be exposed to bad ideas, because a little poison makes your brain stronger. Accepting for a moment that this is true, I don't see the metaphor here either.

In a world where there are three primetime news options, each of those options has a powerful ability to give or remove a platform, and that's reflected in the Murrow story. Only Murrow could give him a platform. But today, that's not the case. It was not possible for McCarthy to start a TV station in the analogy. Today, all of these far-right people can easily (and do) start their own media outlets. First, there is a major cable network who will platform anyone on the right. Second, if they reject you for being too extreme, you can move to Breitbart or TheGatewayPundit or Infowars or really anywhere else. You can tweet on Gab.

It's closer to the scenario immediately after the revolutionary war. Many newspapers would not carry what they viewed seditious speech. When speakers could not write op-eds in contemporary newspapers, they simply started their own, problem solved. No one argued that it was a violation of Matthew Lyon's free speech that newspapers wouldn't run his "Adams Is A Tyrant" op-ed. He just started his own newspaper.

And no one would argue that printing companies had to sell him the press, nor did trading outposts have to carry his newspaper, nor did skilled typesetters have to work to typeset. Everyone could contractually choose not to do business with him. Luckily for him, enough people agreed that they would do business with him, and so he kept speaking.

If people think Patreon is really mean for denying Rhodes Scholar Milo Yiannopoulous a financial lifetime, they can come up with another way to give money. May I suggest the literally hundreds of cryptocurrencies, giving us more options than ever to pay? Don't like cryptocurrencies? Nothing stopping Brain Genius Carl Benjamin from taking money via the mail or finding a payment processor run by someone who agrees with him to take bank transfers

And then my other point was that in the metaphor, a journalist gave a platform to a US senator. Patreon isn't deplatforming US senators, and neither is anyone else. They're deplatforming extreme fringe people. Maybe you like Carl Benjamin, you do you, but the historical parallel isn't McCarthy, it's legitimately socially fringe figures, like George Lincoln Rockwell. I don't think anyone gave him an episode of TV.

So if the point of the metaphor isn't that "pluralism is good" and it isn't that "sunshine is the best disinfectant", and Patreon isn't a metaphor for Murrow, and McCarthy isn't a metaphor for Benjamin, then what exactly is the point? It's not clear to me.