> On the other hand, at what point do we accept that we have different viewpoints and live and let live?
The government, soapboxes, homes and places of business that are happy to have them.
Freedom of Speech is not the right to be heard. If people don't like what you have to say, or how you are saying it, they are free to walk away. If you don't like what someone is doing in your place of business, you can also throw them out. That includes being allowed to throw a loud ranting racist out of a, say, pub or a website.
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 (unless they venture into fighting words). They, however, seem to want to be where their ideas are not wanted[1].
Patreon would likely be happy to have a conservative on their website if the primary concern of the content was not intolerance.
> I'm torn about this.
Karl Popper helps clear it up[2]. His wording surrounding FoS is particularly illuminating because it doesn't specifically calling out left-extremists or right-extremists; both have been pretty awful about attacking speech, especially the escalation over the past few years.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vote_brigading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vote_brigading
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
> If people don't like what you have to say, or how you are saying it, they are free to walk away.
Yes, but it's funny that we're now deliberating conflating 'people' with 'private corporations', a conflation that folks on the left vociferously condemned when it came to Citizens United.
I think we should look at ourselves a bit more carefully in the mirror - are private corporations supposed to be held to a higher standard or not? Especially when they have de facto monopolistic control over platforms that everyone uses.
For example, it's all very well to say that Google is a private corporation free to censor you if it wishes, until you're a content creator that is de facto knocked off the air because of Content ID, without any of the due process that copyright law actually demands.
Put in another context, should we get rid of net neutrality because Comcast ought to have the right to decide what content goes over its pipes?
>Put in another context, should we get rid of net neutrality because Comcast ought to have the right to decide what content goes over its pipes?
No, we should ban monopolies for one thing, and 2) the whole point of net neutrality is to bring the idea of "common carrier" to the internet. If you provide the transit pathways, you shouldn't get to play favorites.
I'll make an analogy: if you own a public stage, you should have every right to deny access to Nazis who want to use it to publicly promote their viewpoint. However, if you own a train system (which also happens to be a government-granted monopoly and highly regulated as such), you should have no right to restrict the Nazis' travel, as long as they follow the rules and don't create a disturbance; they should be able to buy train tickets just like anyone else. (Now if they attack people on the train, or try to make public speeches on them or in the stations, that's different.)
> should we get rid of net neutrality because Comcast
NN governs as though the service is a public utility. There are some businesses that are crucial for upholding FoS (they could be equated to soapboxes). Patreon is not crucial for protecting FoS, nor is YouTube.
> Especially when they have de facto monopolistic control
The important determinant is that it is not de jure.
> left vociferously condemned
The left condemned it because it was pluralist, and the left agreed with majoritarian ideologies (hence: democrats).
Furthermore, things were radically different back then. The Democrats originally supported the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the Republicans rose as the opposition. All that tu quoque proves is that times and people change.
In more practical terms: a private corporation consists of human beings, who may not want to deal with certain ideologies.
> should we get rid of net neutrality because Comcast ought to have the right to decide what content goes over its pipes?
Not only should we not get rid of net neutrality, we should enshrine it as a principle further up the protocol stack.
The difference between YouTube or Patreon and Comcast is that one is a platform while the other provides infrastructure. Net neutrality applies specifically to ISPs because often there is no alternative.
Meanwhile, a different platform (of which many exist) is trivial to switch to. The reason that some platforms are more popular than others is precisely because they are tailored to appeal to the mainstream without extreme content pushing people off.
The problem comes when network effects, entry barriers, and oligopolies make private exclusion take the character of a ban from the public square. Starting a rival credit card company, payment processor, and social network is not a viable option for people looking to participate in public discourse.
Plenty of times throughout history, oligopolists and monopolists have been forced to follow common-carriage rules, whether by actual regulation or the threat thereof.
Also, you are conflating the First Amendment, a legal instrument, with the ideas of freedom of speech and open discourse. The First Amendment bars the government from itself censoring people. It does not say that the government cannot require non-discrimination on the part of private companies.
But now you're changing the argument: that not only must you have free speech, but that others must assist you in getting compensated for your speech and to help you potentially subsist off of it.
That's never been part of any conversation about free speech. (Even the broader non 1st amendment version). And it doesn't make sense. You can always take cash or check. The post office doesn't discriminate.
> 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
That's very clearly not true at all. Just a dozen or so major companies or orgs can work together to shut you out of having nearly any reach at all. For practical purposes, you'll have zero reach. Any combined small group of them can easily be enough to make your life online dramatically more difficult.
They can get you at the domain registration (oligopoly + mixture of cartel behavior). Oh, well, you have no right to a domain registration.
They can get you at the ISP level (oligopoly). Oh, well, you have no right to Internet access.
They can get you at the discovery level. Oh, well, Google (monopoly), Facebook (monopoly), Twitter, Reddit, et al. don't owe you any discovery access.
They can get you at the hosting level. Oh, well, nobody owes you access to any sort of hosting, from Azure or AWS to Wordpress or Tumblr.
They can get you at the network transit level. If just a few ISPs or large backbone operators in the US blacklist your site from their customers, few will be able to see you. Again for practical purposes, you're dead in that market.
Google as one example has openly bragged about their potential to conspire with other malevolent entities to tightly control expression/speech. They know their position and exactly how they can abuse it to their political or ideological bias.
In the age of inherently subjective 'hate speech' as The Devil that must be stopped at any and all costs, none of this is far fetched in the least. It's going to get a lot worse yet; the topics covered by 'hate speech' blockades will get far more extensive in the coming years. The enemies of free speech have been wildly emboldened by their successes and the lack of push-back. The entire West is going to end up with the equivalent of a less restrictive Chinese firewall, and that's where liberal Democracy is guaranteed to die.
Just a dozen or so major companies or orgs can work together to shut you out of having nearly any reach at all.
Yep. And it's happened in the past. That's why so many tinfoil hat types ended up on shortwave radio, or sticking flyers to lampposts.
Desperate people desperately trying to get a message out, with no means to do so.
>If you don't like what someone is doing in your place of business, you can also throw them out.
Although we all agree that this is legal to do (and nobody is thinking about taking Patreon to court), there is a second, more subtle social issue at play. Taking it to the extreme, if you live in a company town earning company scrip to spend at the company store, when the company decides that they don't like what you're doing in their place of business (organizing a union, perhaps), getting kicked out is functionally identical to a governmental sanction. As a result, even though the law permits companies to engage in heavy-handed social hedge-trimming, in some cases it can have the same problems as the government censorship that we have already agreed is bad. It would be going too far to say that corporations have an inalienable moral right to police whatever they control.
I don't think anyone is saying that there should be a law that forces Patreon to allow everyone on their platform. More a lamenting that the consequences of large platforms acting like this might be bigger than people think.
Reminds me a little of the whole Parental Advisory thing with rock music or Spotify's decisions around violent artists. How outraged should we be that artists that say very questionable things are on Spotify and Youtube? Should songs about murder, rape or glorifying breaking the law be allowed on those platforms? Or where should the companies draw the line?
To reinforce the grand-parent point: the services are free to put the line wherever they please. It's literally their private business.
If you want a service with more inclusive tolerance levels, sign up for such a service (and not Youtube), or found such a service (and try to make it viable).
The problem is, of course, centralization. Network effects make a few successful services kings of a market, so "everybody" wants to be represented there. This puts such a service in a position of significant power. People actually vote them into that position of power by their continued patronage; this is their free choice, even if not always well thought-out choice.
So, if you want less powerful centralized players, use decentralized services where you can, help fund, build, and spread them. Think Facebook vs Mastodon. (Unfortunately, in music space, there's no decentralized analog to Spotify or Bandcamp.) Internet itself is such a decentralized platform, just not on the application / business level. Good thing we still have it, at least.
For decades Walmart, the largest retailer in the world, exclusively sold censored music albums, yet nobody rioted over that, we all just knew not to buy our CDs there. I don't understand why people all the sudden believe they have a God given right to spew their garbage all over every platform in existence.... that's something very new.
EDIT: Source: https://corporate.walmart.com/_news_/news-archive/2008/04/29/mature-merchandise-music-video-games-movies https://corporate.walmart.com/_news_/news-archive/2008/04/29...
>MUSIC: Wal-Mart does not carry music that has the “parental advisory” label which warns parents about explicit lyrics. We carry some "edited" versions of music that have been provided by the artist or the music label. Wal-Mart does not edit music. Our role is simply to provide music selections that we believe our customers want to buy.
The question is; where does it end?
Sure, I guess you could say Patreon has the right to ban people from its service. But people have found its not easy or practical to compete with them. They've found everyone from their domain registrar to their website host to their payment processor refusing to do business with them.
And at some point, that means it becomes virtually impossible to express yourself if your views are unpopular enough. No one wants to be a service or common carrier, everyone buckles under controversy when it occurs. Should some views only be expressable by millionaires or people with enough resources not to need services from anyone? It's not legal censorship, but it's de facto censorship none the less.
As the likes of SubscribeStar found out, offering a 'free speech' alternative to Patreon is now virtually impossible because of it.
https://www.ft.com/content/7c4285b2-fe2f-11e8-ac00-57a2a826423e https://www.ft.com/content/7c4285b2-fe2f-11e8-ac00-57a2a8264...
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 speech, and effectively stifle that speech.
Maybe that’s better than the alternative, which is that companies are forced to carry speech they don’t agree with or even find “repulsive”.
However there is a concept of “public forum” and at some point it is incumbent on private enterprises controlling key internet infrastructure like DNS, IP allocation, peering, DDoS, and even payments at some point, to become neutral carriers which cannot and should not interfere with providing services based on content.
This to me is an even more fundamental neutrality than what is referred to as “network neutrality” because we’re talking about blocking service entirely not just prioritizing packets for higher paying customers.
This is a critical stance to take now, not 10 years from now after the frog is boiled. I think the average entitled American has absolutely no clue how quickly a regime can become repressive, and how much repression is going on out there. We tip toe around talking about Daily Stormer when countries today are inspecting packets to cart people off to new age gulags.
Nazis are a pathetic boogeyman to justify this kind of censorship. Laying this kind of groundwork to kick out a “radical anti-feminist” I personally hope that Patreon users rebel against that.
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.
And I'll free admit, just so the purists can get it out of the way, that I think there are types of speech that should not be socially tolerated. Hate speech shouldn't get public protection. Shun me for it if you like.
From these two things, I find that businesses refusing to do business with the likes of Stormfront, or this "radical anti-feminist", or whatever, is a very good proxy for social standards. Why? Because like I said, business is amoral. It doesn't care about hate speech. But when that speech is so repulsive that businesses worry about the general public, their other customers, punishing them for supporting it, then that's a good point to say "No, this is not acceptable".
And to be clear, I'm drawing a line about the freedom to not do business with someone - not a law to punish speech. I'm not saying throw them in jail for speaking in hate. I'm saying that it's not good to require business to provide a platform for their hate.
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Theres a fine line between “being allowed to throw a loud ranting racist out of a pub” because the pub is your business and you should be allowed to choose who to do business with and you don’t like racists... and throwing out a person of a different race because it’s your business and you should be allowed to choose who to do business with and don’t like that race...
That is, we want businesses to have the right to choose who to do business with, unless we disagree with their reasons for not wanting to do business with someone.
The line isn't very fine.
There's a clear difference between traits that you were BORN with, and things that you CHOOSE to say.
To put it more simply for you – it's difficult for someone to change their skin colour. It's not really that difficult for them to not say racist things in a pub.
Yes, a society* enforces certain choices, but not every choice. "Everything what is not expressly forbidden is allowed" still applies.
* Yes, "society" here works through state. But without a reasonably wide consensus in the society, a norm cannot be effectively imposed: most people would break it and be sure that everyone around won't mind. (Manufacturing such a consent, if it's not yet there, is another business.)
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It's not really a fine line. There are specific, protected people-features you can't use to discriminate. Saying stupid shit isn't one of them. Race is.
Those laws don't exist because we don't agree with their reasons. They exist to protect people who have been categorically repressed for hundreds of years.
The problem is, "intolerance" is an arbitrary distinction, especially over time and especially now. In sites like Patreon, Youtube, or Reddit which apparently presume to operate as a free marketplace to identify, discuss, and promote ideas, censoring those which merely hate (rather than actively condone actual/specific acts of violence) sets the precedent toward greater and more arbitrary censorship (whether people that condone it acknowledge it or not). As the goalposts shift, more 'reasonable' and, let's go with your word, 'conservative' ideas begin to be denounced and censored.
Your argument 'not the right to be heard' does not apply in the context of shutting down users with controversial ideas on sites like Patreon and Reddit because visitors have ample space to not seek out the quiet 'ranting racist'. I have yet to experience people being thrown out of a bar, restaurant, or business because their conversation included racist or controversial topics.
> Freedom of Speech is not the right to be heard. If people don't like what you have to say, or how you are saying it, they are free to walk away.
That's technically correct, but it doesn't get at the core of the concept. If you read the original arguments in favor of freedom of speech, you'll see they don't focus on the rights of the speaker as much as the rights of the listener. John Milton, Thomas Paine, and John Stuart Mill all made the point (in various ways) that every time you stop someone from saying or publishing an idea, you are also preventing others who want to hear or read that idea from doing so. In addition, censorship requires delegating a censor. Effectively, that means you are letting someone else decide what you're allowed to read and hear. I don't know about everyone else, but there is no government body or private company that I trust with that power. Disclaimers, warnings, and age verification steps are fine, but memory-holing ideas? No thank you.
In the case of Patreon, there is a man who people want to give money to. He wants to accept that money. There is no criminal activity on either side of the transaction. Yet Patreon is preventing these people from doing what they want because Patreon dislikes one paragraph of the man's boorish utterances. This is in direct contradiction to their stated policy (where the person has to endanger the safety of others) and there's a suspicious amount of partisan bias in the application of these policies.
Patreon isn't the first company to behave this way, just the most recent. These actions increase political polarization, erode public trust in institutions and companies, and confirm the persecution complexes of many on the ends of the political spectrum. I'm sure the people in charge of these platforms feel like they're doing the right thing, but I think they are mistaken.
Listeners are perfectly free to go elsewhere to hear racist speech — Gab exists, 4chan exists, and there are plenty of smaller sites dedicated to this as well. Insofar as they want to support someone monetarily, no one can prevent them from using Bitcoin.
> Freedom of Speech is not the right to be heard.
People keep saying this and repeating it, but as far as I can tell this meme is destructive and wrong. Freedom of speech isn't just a legal assurance that congress shall make no law abridging it. It is also a set of cultural norms rooted deeply in a long lineage of hard won ideas. It is Evelyn Hall's principle "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it". It is Friedrich Nietzsche's dictum that only insecure societies are threatened by quirky characters with weird ideas. It is our own Daniel Gackle's observation that tolerance is the experience of suffering through unpleasant ideas. We endure that suffering because the world is dramatically better on balance when we do.
Popper and the paradox of tolerance have nothing to do with it because we aren't talking about fascists angling to march on Washington DC to burn down the Library of Congress. We're talking about people who may have made a careless remark, or have quirky ideas, or disagree with the overall bent of the arc of history.
By banning these people platforms like Twitter and Patreon are eroding free speech not in the legal sense, but in the cultural norms sense. If these norms continue getting eroded, god help us all -- it may set humanity and the western civilization back by hundreds of years.
Thanks for that, it's the first reply that's given me food for thought.
This is total crap. That norm was long abandoned. Absolutely no one on the right defends freed of speech as a cultural norm. The modern right uses "freedom of speech" as a proxy to discriminate/marginalize and spread hate speech.
Edit:Boohoo, I offended the snowflakes.
The fact that you believe what you wrote makes it painfully obvious you've never actually listened to any of what the "modern right" is saying and have no idea what message they are spreading, hate speech or not.
Perhaps you should look at your own faults before condemning others. Your misguided hard line belief makes you similar to the Puritans of old trying to suppress anti Christian heresy.
It's kind of ironic, actually.
> The government, soapboxes, homes and places of business that are happy to have them.
This made a lot of sense when I was a kid. Since that time, communication has become incredibly centralized - whether it’s the platform (eg, YT), or the infrastructure to keep it running (eg, Cloudflare.)
Today, if one or two private enterprises decide they want to eliminate your voice, you’re effectively barred from the public square. You can’t roll your own cloud flare.
When private resources so entirely consume our public interactions, the old stand-by of “well, private companies can do what they want...” seems to engage in a form of category error. It may be a private organization, but it’s dominating a public good.
I don't think this is anywhere near true. Even without the largest 100 internet companies, it is still orders of magnitude easier to get a message out to a large audience than it has been at any other time throughout history.
You don't need a fancy Cloudflare proxy to get a message out there. A static site is easy to host and there are thousands of sites/services to choose from.
You can still stand on a soapbox, you can post a link on a wide variety of message boards, write an opinion piece for a newspaper, etc.
>Freedom of Speech is not the right to be heard
Then this limited "freedom of speech", a provincial americanism based on a historical accident (the first amendment), is not the full freedom of speech the philosophers of enlightenment, artists, activists, etc., described.
>If people don't like what you have to say, or how you are saying it, they are free to walk away
In this case, they weren't free to walk away, they were thrown out, regardless of whether what was said was popular or not.
If we allow those with internet platforms to decide what's ok to be written, we're regressing before the enlightenment.
It doesn't matter if someone can "create their own platform". A right to free speech should include the ability to talk in the popular platforms of the day, the "marketplace of ideas". Nobody should be guaranteed an audience, but nobody should be denied a place to speak and potentially gather one.
(Of course big private interests have all the space they want in their own owned platforms, from TV channels and websites, to press and social media -- for them there's no "make your own website to spew your shit", they already have all of them -- and they get to pick who gets to participate in them).
Also note that just because the wind today is pro-progressive, and people you like (like the Patreon guy) get to dictate who says what and what's not to be said on their properties, it doesn't mean it will always be this way. The liberal twenties in Germany were followed by Nazism. The 60's and early 70's in the US were followed by Reagan. Consider freedom of speech practices that should apply now and later, when progressives don't have the same clout.
These platforms are becoming the de facto public square, and there is not necessarily room for a bunch of competing platforms to function collectively as a public square; one will tend to dominate for each form of content, it appears.
These platforms are supposed to do two things:
- blog/media hosting, both storage and web distribution
- Handling regulatory and coding requirements for accepting payments, via a trustworthy single payee... so that subscribers aren't having to provide credit card numbers to every random content creator out there
These platforms are violating expectations by going beyond solving those problems and trying to be a nanny. We don't need nannies on the internet.
They aren't even doing a good job of being a neutral nanny. On patreon, there is a ton of objectionable content depending on your point of view and morality. (On youtube, there is a ton of garbage content, though not much adult/erotic material because it's mostly banned.) If either platform cared about the perception of their platforms being a place for content appropriate for a formal dinner party, they wouldn't operate as they do now.
In the case of Patreon, if someone doesn't like a patreon creator's content, they don't have to subscribe to it.
Patreon content is discoverable, but it's not self-promoted by Patreon, so people aren't generally going to see much that they find objectionable. For platforms like youtube, which use subscriptions/histories to recommend other videos unsolicited, there needs to be a better tagging system so visitors can blacklist tags that will trigger them. Other than that, these platforms are not, and should not pretend to be, in the nanny business. And everyone needs to have a thick enough skin that they can encounter a summary, title, or first few seconds of a video they find offensive and simply laugh it off as internet idiots being idiots, and navigate elsewhere rather than pretending they have moral justification to complain to platforms about content that is neither violence-promoting nor defamatory.
I think the recent congressional hearings regarding Facebook frames this argument more properly. At the heart, it's whether these platforms are to be considered content providers or publishers. I believe each has unique responsibilities to the 1st amendment
The problem with the Paradox of Tolerance is that while in theory it is quite correct and rather profound, in practice it's often an explanation trotted out by those in power to silence those they do not like.
> Freedom of Speech is not the right to be heard
I partially agree. Freedom of speech isn't the right to be heard by those who don't want to hear you, but it most certainly is the right to be heard by those who do want to hear you.
To put it another way: Alice wants to say something. Bob wants to hear what Alice has to say. Cedric, a would-be censor, wants to prevent Alice getting her message out to Bob. Censorship is whenever Cedric wins, and freedom of speech is whenever Cedric fails.
Loved the link to the paradox on wikipedia. I have said my whole adult life that I believe in tolerance for everything but intolerance - never knew and happy to find it's been called out as a bit of a paradox since 1945!
Excellent intellectual ammunition.
Why should your right to not hear something trump my right to hear it?
> loud ranting racist
Yeah.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18750037 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18750037
> They, however, seem to want to be where their ideas are not wanted[1].
How are mobs following people they don't like around, seeking to destroy their livelihoods not much worse than "vote brigading"?
And on what planet aren't those mobs using vote brigading on top of that?
How do you then defend Patreon hosting radical leftists calling for political violence on their platform, and not taking it down after its reported? But banning a viewpoint opponent of social justice for what seems to be clearly political reasons?
[1] https://www.patreon.com/intlantifadefence https://www.patreon.com/intlantifadefence
[2] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/antifa-domestic-terrorists-us-security-agencies-homeland-security-fbi-a7927881.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/antifa-dom...
[3] https://www.patreon.com/chapotraphouse https://www.patreon.com/chapotraphouse
[4] https://www.reddit.com/r/ChapoTrapHouse/comments/9k14nf/why_does_chapo_promote_political_violence/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ChapoTrapHouse/comments/9k14nf/why_...
[5] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_violence https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_violence
How do you defend them employing someone that is a public supporter of the domestic terrorist organization antifa?
[6] http://www.returnofkings.com/125075/patreon-employee-aaron-ringgenberg-publicly-supports-antifa-domestic-terrorist-organization http://www.returnofkings.com/125075/patreon-employee-aaron-r...
Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.
Isn't that more or less the argument against Net Neutrality? Why must the pipes carry all content without favor, but content aggregators are free to discriminate against viewpoints?
> The government, soapboxes, homes and places of business that are happy to have them.
But if say ISPs start blocking non-beige content, then freedom of speech is dead. Shouldn't there be a minimum internet infrastructure where people can say whatever they want? Aren't CDNs part of that infrastructure?
"is not the right to be heard"
What is it then?
PS
I have to add that the "loudness" of some point of view in the social media is the willingness of people to hear or see that point of view.
>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.
This is not just about free speech and freedom of association. It's about anti-competitive practices in the marketplaces. People who have done what you suggest discover a coordinated effort to de-platform which includes things like making it impossible to use theoretically neutral infrastructure, like CAs or DNS or routing or payment systems or monetization. Meanwhile "approved" competitors see no such bar. In the United States this is conspiracy to restrain trade. When a person can only make a living if the platforms approve of the content, the platform is picking winners and losers in the market. These are outrageously unfair business practices.