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Stripe bans Trump campaign

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Re: Stripe bans Trump campaign

#551

Post by BlanketLogic »

nmfisher wrote: post #512
jaredklewis wrote: post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't have a twitter account and login to Facebook once a month. If both went away tomorrow, my life would continue, very much as now. And I think this is true for most people. If my water, power, or internet was cut off, I would immediately suffer real, life changing inconvenience and hardship. To me, the difference between these things is incredibly stark.

If you were cut off from social media, payment processors, web hosts and mail providers, would you practically be able to launch a political campaign?

That is a non-sequitur right? Twitter , Google and Apple via their app stores, and now stripe are refusing to doing business not with a political party. They are refusing to doing business with people who have committed alleged(?) crimes.

The _actions_ by a group of people are resulting in these bans. Not the group's affiliation. Am I missing something here?

Re: Stripe bans Trump campaign

#552

Post by wnevets »

trustfundbaby wrote: post #279

I was on the fence about this, but reading the comments convinced me it was the absolute right decision. The fact that all these institutions just allowed this horrible hateful speech for four years, in the name of free speech etc, despite all the harassment, harm (mental and otherwise) it caused to so many people in America actually emboldened so many to the extent that now that they crossed this invisible line, the…

Lets be honest, republicans (including trump) fought hard to allow companies to do this and much worse. They just though only cake companies in the bible belt would do it to gay couples, not to republicans.

Re: Stripe bans Trump campaign

#553

Post by ineedasername »

na85 wrote: post #428
klaudius wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Payment networks are where the network effects and scale are. Visa and Mastercard have been known to ban people for political reasons. 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.

Then perhaps there's a market opportunity for a credit card and online payment company that caters to white supremacists?

::Announcer Voice:: "Banned from Master Card? Try Master Racecard. Disclaimer: proof of aryan ancestry required; octoroons need not apply.

Re: Stripe bans Trump campaign

#554

Post by yibg »

johndevor wrote: post #316
avianlyric wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Freedom of speech has nothing to do with newspapers or news, and never has done. It only protects you from government, nothing else. There are legitimate concerns regarding monopolistic behaviour of large digital gatekeepers. But we don’t solve that by deciding to restrict their speech (which is what forced speech would be). You solve it by either making them utilities or breaking them up to create more competition.

> Freedom of speech has nothing to do with newspapers or news, and never has done. If somebody speaks in the woods, and there's nobody there to hear it, do they make a sound? Yes, they technically have free speech, but in reality not really. The purpose of speech is that you might persuade somebody else. If there's nobody to talk to, you might as well not speak at all.

You don't have an inherent right to a megaphone. Freedom of speech means you don't get in trouble from the government for saying things, not that you have the right to broadcast your message.

Re: Stripe bans Trump campaign

#555

Post by nmfisher »

BlanketLogic wrote: post #551
nmfisher wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you were cut off from social media, payment processors, web hosts and mail providers, would you practically be able to launch a political campaign?

That is a non-sequitur right? Twitter , Google and Apple via their app stores, and now stripe are refusing to doing business not with a political party. They are refusing to doing business with people who have committed alleged(?) crimes. The _actions_ by a group of people are resulting in these bans. Not the group's affiliation. Am I missing something here?

My point was more that “just because losing access to Facebook/Twitter means nothing to you, doesn’t mean it means nothing to someone else”.

But to more directly address your point, I ask you - what crime has Trump been convicted of?

Re: Stripe bans Trump campaign

#556

Post by doktrin »

dnissley wrote: post #530
doktrin wrote: post #504

If I had a dime for every time I read some pearl clutching comment about the big brother slippery slope on HN, I could have retired by now. In all these years, the only actual existential danger to society to materialize are precisely the entities that are now being deplatformed. Excuse me if I don't take all this hand wringing on behalf of unstable insurrectionists seriously.

When half the country is so resentful of the other half that it starts to act out, is escalating that situation the best option? Or perhaps you let them vent for a bit (mostly harmlessly, but not entirely) and then try to engage with them and bring them back to reality?

They just vented all over the Capitol. It was far from harmless, and could easily have been much worse. Continued appeasement makes little sense.

If you can provide something other than hand-wavy speculative justification for your theory, I'm all ears.

Re: Stripe bans Trump campaign

#557

Post by npunt »

systemvoltage wrote: post #521
npunt wrote: post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Self-preservation was certainly a part of why there was inaction, as was financial motive. I also think they were rather naïve about their roles & responsibilities and the real world consequence of their own platforms, as well as lacking in a sophisticated understanding of how to do content moderation or even politics. These topics are both very old (social organizing, radicalization, usenet), and very new (primary m…

In their defense, I agree with you that this is a first time when global internet connectivity + social media + hatespeech cocktail has become poisonous to our societal health. We need to deeply think about all this - allowing peaceful, objective, conservative opinions and policy (such as the Lincoln Project) while condemning hate speech, violence, white supremacy and other racist behavior. "He who fights with monste…

100%. I’m worried we have a sort of Patriot Act overreach response to this event, rather than a recognition and diagnosis of broad institutional failure that led to this and a set of reforms of those institutions, be they private or public.

Re: Stripe bans Trump campaign

#558

Post by jonas21 »

grzm wrote: post #506
DSingularity wrote: post #486

I wonder, would these bans would have happened if the Republicans maintained control of the senate?

Counterfactuals are hard, and I'm spitballing here, I think it's useful to consider a scenario where that would be true: for Republicans to have maintained control of the Senate would likely correspond to more public support for Republicans in general, which means it's less likely there would have been run-offs in Georgia; the outcome of the November 2020 elections would likely have been settled much sooner, and less…

I agree with you that counterfactuals are hard (and often pointless) -- but it is worth noting that it would have only taken a small shift in public support for Republicans to have kept control of the Senate -- for example, ~50K votes in the Ossoff/Perdue runoff, or alternately ~14K votes in the same race in the general election. That's an incredibly tiny shift, and one that could have been geographically isolated to a single state.

Additionally, I'd imagine a shift toward Republicans that fell short of Trump winning the presidency would have led to more unrest on Jan 6, not less.

Re: Stripe bans Trump campaign

#559

Post by ineedasername »

syshum wrote: post #304
awat wrote: post #64

Not to be reductionist but I don’t see this as a totalitarian issue. This is a free market decision. $Company decides to sever ties with another organization. That choice can be good, bad, reactive, overreactive, misguided, etc but it’s still a market participant choice. Market remains open for other market participants to make other choices.

First they banned those they deemed to have wrong think from Social Media, crying Build your own Social media, it is a private company... So they did, but the totalitarians were not satisfied, so then they banned them from app stores users used to connect and find the new service... crying Build your own service it is a private company So they did, but the totalitarian were not satisfied so they banned them from the…

Exercise of free market principles by platforms booting people/entities that violate their ToS isn't totalitarian.

Re: Stripe bans Trump campaign

#560

Post by ineedasername »

incrudible wrote: post #353
eejit_compiler wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a counterexample: The Pirate Bay have successfully dealt with this sort of thing for many years, and they were subject to much harsher and more sustained censorship. Including legal attacks by various nation states. Is it really totalitarianism in this case? Or, just some private companies inconveniencing people by choosing not to do business with them?

It is divise and it will backfire. Soon there will have to be a separate everything for Republicans and Democrats. Chances are that Trump is going to own a big part of it. That is why Trump is not on Gab or Parler, because he will compete with them.

He's either making his own or negotiating a piece of Gab or Parker, whichever gives him a bigger piece, to make them his platform of choice.
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