Stripe bans Trump campaign • Hacker News Board

Re: Stripe bans Trump campaign

#801

Post by pbourke » Mon, Jan 11, 2021, 8:09 AM UTC

roenxi wrote: post #736

albertgoeswoof wrote: post #719

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There were gallows, bombs, armour, zip ties and guns brought to the protest. On many of the videos you can hear the trump supporters shouting cries to kill certain members of the government, calling them traitors. Oh and they beat a police officer to death. If they had found a senior official I don’t think they would have been safe.

> There were gallows, bombs, armour, zip ties and guns brought to the protest. How many guns, bombs and zip ties? Was it even enough protestors to be called a minority who bought bombs? The press would love a few photos of people with guns storming the capital, because those that I've seen look like very poorly behaved tourists with souvenirs and selfies. Gallows happen to be a traditional prop at protests (eg, [0]).…

> How many guns, bombs and zip ties?

Good question. We don’t know the answer because federal authorities have not held a press briefing on this incident.

> those that I've seen look like very poorly behaved tourists with souvenirs and selfies

Perhaps you should watch this:

https://www.instagram.com/p/CJxPQcXgq6H/

Re: Stripe bans Trump campaign

#802

Post by kolinko » Mon, Jan 11, 2021, 8:12 AM UTC

Grimm1 wrote: post #705

nmfisher wrote: post #585

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question is not “what legal power does Twitter have”. I’m not saying they legally can’t kick him off their platform. The discussion is whether they should be able to kick someone off their platform who has been convicted of no crime, because of how integral they have become to the political process.

Yes, because you don't have to be convicted of a crime to have done something wrong and regardless it doesn't matter. Twitter can kick someone off for whatever reason they want. That's something currently protected in our law.

On the other hand, there is a legal concept called Common Carriage - private companies that have monopoly are not allowed to refuse service to anyone unless mandated by courts.

If it was a power company shutting off electricity to Facebok, Twitter and AWS, because they disagree with their business practices, we would have an outrage right now about how undemocratic it is.

(And I say this with all my distaste for Trumpism)

Re: Stripe bans Trump campaign

#803

Post by ryanlol » Mon, Jan 11, 2021, 8:13 AM UTC

rektide wrote: post #469

ryanlol wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is AWS anything like an “utility”? There are hundreds of viable hosting options for large sites.

some previous names for cloud compute entities were "grid compute" and "utility computing". some veneer of old-school small fries still exist thank the stars but absolutely, more & more of the internet is powered by the hyperscalers. absolutely terrifying seeing the scales keep tilting heavier & heavier towards fewer & fewer options.

> absolutely terrifying seeing the scales keep tilting heavier & heavier towards fewer & fewer options

This is just not happening. Except apparently in the minds of many HNers who live in some bizarre alternate reality.

Re: Stripe bans Trump campaign

#804

Post by DSingularity » Mon, Jan 11, 2021, 8:14 AM UTC

jonas21 wrote: post #558

grzm wrote: post #506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Maybe they are often pointless but I think in this case it would be helpful if we found out the main drivers for these decisions.

Let’s not undermine the significance of techs decision to censor here. The potential blowback could be in tens of millions of users abandoning these platforms for alternatives.

So should we give them credit or was this a political decision? Maybe the DOJ will drop its cases against big tech. Maybe the senate/congress will stop calling the CEOs to testify.

Re: Stripe bans Trump campaign

#805

Post by edmundsauto » Mon, Jan 11, 2021, 8:14 AM UTC

Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #600

ineedasername wrote: post #580

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the government should instead step in and decide what companies can and can't do with their own services & infrastructure? That sounds a lot more fascist to me than a company saying, up front, "Here's the rules for using our service. Violate them and you can take your business elsewhere." And considering the ToS citations were I service of a potentially criminal act, fascism doesn't enter the picture: This is as m…

> Violate them and you can take your business elsewhere. Here, I fixed it for you: Violate them, and if you are not someone whose political views we support, you can take your business elsewhere.

As has been said elsewhere, this is not about disagreeing with someone’s political views. This is about not amplifying a voice that incites a mob to attack congress and overturn an election.

And they aren’t even banning people for solely the latter! Representatives who continue to support the president have had no issues.

Re: Stripe bans Trump campaign

#806

Post by canoebuilder » Mon, Jan 11, 2021, 8:14 AM UTC

systemvoltage wrote: post #685

rayiner wrote: post #634

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. But that’s the problem. Nobody trusts people in Silicon Valley or New York City to decide what those things are. These are people who have internalized ideas like “you can’t be racist against white peo…

There shouldn't be any problem with these discussions when they're posed without hate. Immigration for example should be discussed in terms of cost/benefit and immigration of talent, policies, etc., not "Build a wall and Mexico will pay for it" or outright banning people based on religion (remember Muslim ban?). The problem is that these are not conservative principles. This is just hate spewing, plain and straight.

> This is just hate spewing, plain and straight.

Hate is an emotion, it is subjective. You might feel hate when you see or hear something, but it is not an intrinsic, objective quality of other people's words.

Without using these emotional trigger words, do you think the citizens of a country should be able to decide who visits them in their country?

Re: Stripe bans Trump campaign

#807

Post by LoSboccacc » Mon, Jan 11, 2021, 8:25 AM UTC

dataflow wrote: post #127

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #95

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 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…

> I don't know at what point these cross into "utility" territory

I think there's an obvious midpoint missing in the discussion between private and utility, which is monopoly, which do have additional set of laws and checks in place precisely for their strength against the free market.

preemptive "there are plenty alternatives so they are not monopolies" - if turns out these alternatives are acting in concert, it configures a cartel, which can get regulated in all the same ways.

the economical concepts behind these events aren't so alien as the folk around made them to be, their novelty is in their application to intangible assets (views and online services) but most of the issues are the same as they were decades ago and the same concepts apply, to the same conclusions.

Re: Stripe bans Trump campaign

#808

Post by onion2k » Mon, Jan 11, 2021, 8:27 AM UTC

oceanplexian wrote: post #800

onion2k wrote: post #745

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not everyone in the mob was out for blood, but the mob as a collective group was. The mob killed a police officer. Anyone who was part of the mob is partly to blame for that. No one can take part in a group action and then claim they're not responsible for what the group has done. When people act as a group they have to accept responsibility for the group's actions.

It's starting to come out that his death was a driven by a medical condition and not actually as a result of violent attack. While the news is still fairly fresh it seems like most mainstream news organizations have been misrepresenting the facts.

The way you wrote that makes it sound like you got that from a "non-mainstream" news organization. How do you know it's true?

Re: Stripe bans Trump campaign

#809

Post by rayiner » Mon, Jan 11, 2021, 8:27 AM UTC

ngcazz wrote: post #700

rayiner wrote: post #634

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. But that’s the problem. Nobody trusts people in Silicon Valley or New York City to decide what those things are. These are people who have internalized ideas like “you can’t be racist against white peo…

Black people getting lynched and yet the violent radical is Angela Davis. Right.

I don’t even judge her for the 1970 courthouse shooting, but the New York Times is publishing flattering pieces on her even as she continues to support terrorism against Israel.

Re: Stripe bans Trump campaign

#810

Post by rndgermandude » Mon, Jan 11, 2021, 8:35 AM UTC

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?

In the case of Stripe cutting off the Trump campaign, I guess you could make the argument that Trump (and therefore his campaign) are indeed alleged to have committed crimes. Then again, Trump is still the sitting president and therefore the effective head of his party (even tho, thankfully, at least some of his party are now abandoning him). I wonder what would happen if the Trump campaign switched to RNC-operated stripe accounts, with the RNC's blessing...

As for Google + Apple + Amazon (+ probably every other cloud provider and virtually every other hosting company) cutting off Parler or refusing their business in the first place: Parler was accused of not moderating "enough". This in itself is not yet criminal, given section 230 (which in this context ironically Trump wanted gone so bad he tried to hold the military budget hostage over it), and the definition of "enough moderation" was kept vague enough by Apple and Google and Amazon that Parler couldn't possibly ever comply if they wanted to.

The same argument about under-moderation can be made against facebook, e.g. when they aided - or even enabled - the Rohingya genocide, which saw thousands of people killed and hundreds of thousands of people displaced. Even the UN directly pointed fingers at facebook. Facebook admitted to their role[1], but came up with a bunch of lame excuses like that they do not really have any content moderators that understand the language.

People dug up quite a number of screenshots (anecdotal evidence) of abhorrent things written on Parler to justify them getting punished. But I found that not really convincing to single out Parler like that. If I went digging on Twitter or Facebook, or could see what people tell each other in Whatapp of Telegram groups, I would find the exact same things. I have reported things on twitter in the past, like people making extremely thinly-veiled death threats or inciting violence, and twitter's response has been sluggish and often in favor of the people talking about "nooses" and "you'll get what's coming to you" in the same sentence.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/06/technology/myanmar-facebo...