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Will it get to the point that this is considered “vigilante justice?” We don’t know what was done to the RNC, or why. It’s odd to release such a non-statement,

Will it get to the point that this is considered “vigilante justice?” We don’t know what was done to the RNC, or why. It’s odd to release such a non-statement, but if the RNC is encouraging violence, that’s breaking laws and should be prosecuted. If they haven’t violated laws, and there’s no injunction then Salesforce is serving in the role of punisher. I get that it’s their service and they can legally serve whomever they like, but line item vetoing people and companies based on an arbitrary, changing criteria leads to mistakes and generally bad business. If I have to think about whether one day my dashboard software will turn off because one of my executives does something bad, then that’s going to make me not want to use it. This is a slippery slope argument, of course, and I should have good executives. But I don’t think I want to buy software from services that could just one day decide to stop serving me for an unclear reason.

_jal 6y ago
> for an unclear reason. I have no comment on the rest of your commentary, but the reason this happened is one of the few things in this story that is quite clear.
- prepend 6y ago
  I’m clear on why trump was banned. Clear that a coup was attempted and lots of people will, hopefully, be brought to justice. I’m not clear on why the RNC would be kicked off. I’m not being facetious, why was the RNC whatevered by Salesforce?
  - matthewdgreen 6y ago
    According to this article [0], the reason given is that they were using Salesforce products to send fundraising emails that claimed the election was stolen. [0] https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2021/01/11/salesforce-says-it-has-taken-action-against-rnc-email-campaign-that-falsely-claims-election-fraud/ https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2021/01/11/salesforce-says...
    - prepend 6y ago
      “Hundreds of emails” seems like a poor reason to revoke all activities. It’s hard to say without seeing the actual text but unless they were saying to burn down the capitol, I don’t think political emails saying the election was stolen are noteworthy. This is based on my own experience of getting large numbers of spam letters making all sorts of stupid claims “Jane Doe is a terrorist” “Nancy Pelosi is going to take your guns” “Trump is going to put your kids in cages” “Biden will destroy America” While I would like to block all this crap, if Salesforce is going to drop RNC over “donate to us because the election is stolen” they they will need to drop many other people.
      - matthewdgreen 6y ago
        I don’t think the article says that Salesforce has permanently dropped the RNC. They may just have cut off access to some email capabilities, or even specific emails. And comparing this to other election email without context is disingenuous. If rioters had just stormed the Capitol building over some accusation the DNC was making, you can bet they’d be getting the same treatment.
Jonnax 6y ago
Any service you are a customer of have clauses with say that they terminate your service if they want. Republicans have fought for people's right to do so. If you recall the case of baker that didn't want to make a gay wedding cake. Now companies in the tech business are doing the same but to some of the groups that campaigned for that freedom. Sure there's some argument that Twitter and Facebook are giant monopolies in the social media space. But Salesforce? There's like a 1000 CRMs
- secfirstmd 6y ago
  True. And one big difference. You don't get to choose to be gay, have a disability or be from a minority or whatever. You do however choose to go to a Capital Hill riot or be complicit in supporting a dangerous man with autocratic tendencies.
  - themaninthedark 6y ago
    You do however choose your religion and yet that is a protected class... This is not a road we should be going down.
- jojobas 6y ago
  Any CRM supplier that would dare to deal with RNC would be barraged on social media and lose other business. That sounds a lot like USSR.
  - maxehmookau 6y ago
    At no point in human history has the USSR existed at the same time as modern social media.
  - Jonnax 6y ago
    There's a difference between people giving them negative press and the USSR. One was a government and the other is random people saying "I'm not going to be your customer anymore" There's also plenty of open source CRMs they could deploy. If they're afraid of the cloud they could rent a dedicated server or colocate. I'm sure if they host in a very pro Republican state they wouldn't have issues. They could even host it in another country if they wanted to as well. They've got a lot of freedom
sneak 6y ago
I agree with this 100%, but also want to temper this with "this is nothing new". Your hosting/cloud was always willing to drop your ass the moment you made bad PR for them. This is one of many reasons I think going full lock-in on a proprietary cloud service that you can't ever self-host or migrate to a different cloud in a more favorable jurisdiction is crazy for a business that needs continuity. Who knows which way the wind blows in a quarter or a year or a decade? Take it from the porn industry: you have to be prepared to host it yourself one day.
- Grustaf 6y ago
  I think the new part is that they have started to censor anyone that is even vaguely conservative. Even open critics of Trump like Ron Paul, and now RNC. The end game is obviously that anyone that is not a woke liberal will be cancelled. For the good of the country of course.
  - bitwize 6y ago
    > The end game is obviously that anyone that is not a woke liberal will be cancelled. You say "woke liberal", I say decent person. If you're an unrepentant asshole, you damn well should be cancelled!
    - Grustaf 6y ago
      So only woke liberals are “decent human beings”? Ron Paul is an “unrepentant asshole”?
      - bitwize 6y ago
        By current standards, a big part of human decency is putting the safety of the marginalized before the comfort of the privileged. Republicans as a whole have a very poor track record with that.
        tomp 6y ago
soco 6y ago
Unclear reason you say? They don't want to be liable being used "in ways which could lead to further violence around the country’s presidential transition". And if one of your executives does something bad, it's quite customary for the company to be liable.
- ImprobableTruth 6y ago
  Do you mean 'responsible'? I don't see how they could possibly be held liable.
  - soco 6y ago
    They who? Social media sites or companies with bad acting executives?
jtbayly 6y ago
It has already gotten to that point. It’s not a slippery slope argument, either. It’s already happened to one of the two most powerful groups in the US. On what basis do you think they would hesitate to cancel you?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
jt2190 6y ago
> If they haven’t violated laws, and there’s no injunction then Salesforce is serving in the role of punisher. They very likely violated the terms of service of ExactTarget, their bulk email sender.
bitwize 6y ago
It's time for the Republican Party to be legally banned -- the same way the Germans banned the Nazis after WWII and the Russians banned the Soviet Communist Party after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Failing that, however, it is altogether proper for private entities to neutralize the Republicans and not give them a bit of oxygen -- in the interests of preventing further violence and undermining of the democratic process.
- mkohlmyr 6y ago
  The complete lack of sense of scale that is on display when making comparisons between either of those and a one-term clown who will go down as a footnote in history is borderline disturbing. Get some perspective.
  - bitwize 6y ago
    The Republican Party has, for fifty years, been the party of hate and white supremacy. The Republicans would've faded into history after Kennedy and Johnson incorporated civil rights into the Democratic platform had Nixon's aides not developed the strategy of winning enough votes to be a contender by appealing to all the disgruntled ex-Democrat racists. As a result, the Republican base has been a bunch of far-right loons who fantasize about overthrowing the government for much of that time. This was true long before Trump ever seriously considered politics. Trump just exposed it for what it was, making the American far right feel that finally they were being listened to, finally they were in control. And by approving the insurrection against the government, he accidentally got them to show their true colors. See, I was there the last time an idiosyncratic tycoon had a go at the White House and galvanized the right, namely Ross Perot. He roused the right wing from its malaise and, inadvertently, created the conditions of rage and hatred that led to Timothy McVeigh. So you're right -- Trump is just a footnote. The hatred he stirred up is much bigger than him.
    - salawat 6y ago
      The Democrats right now are coming off as willing to sacrifice civil liberties wholesale to ensure their own power. This has gone far beyond "a return to sensibility". When you start outsourcing unconstitutional behavior to the private sector, I see issues. Then again, in a twisted sort of way, I'm 100% a large chunk of the population has just given everyone ample evidence they are not to be trusted. I'm sad it's come to that for us as a nation, but it's galvanized me to work with the handful of people I hold close to start building up Nexii of good business. So there is that. The American Ideal, and the values we're supposed to stand up for do not look like how people are acting right now. The rest of the world is watching this meltdown, and our wholesale burning ofany high ground we managed to achieve, and well... That's it. Sad to see is all.
zpeti 6y ago
So, medium and long term, what's the plan here (in the market)? Are we going to have "Republican Friendly" services for everything? CRM? Social media? Patreon alternative? App stores?? Seems like the market at some point is going to step in here and serve - wait for it - about half the country, 150m people. (and then let's not forget about the rest of the world, who probably don't want to get involved in US politics, and aren't particularly happy seeing the interference of silicon valley companies in everything - see Merkel and France's ministers statement in the last few days).
- sudhirj 6y ago
  That seems unlikely. Remember that we’re talking about the fringe here - Republican grandparents looking at pictures of their kids and sharing broccoli casserole recipes are not getting kicked off FB or Twitter. Neither are those discussing pickup trucks, beer, blue jeans, Jesus or even guns, to a certain extent. The fringe is much smaller, and serving them profitably is very difficult. It’ll have to be volunteer sites like the N-Chans. The remaining people on social networks are the centrists. You could argue that the extreme left will also be booted off soon, if not already. Anyone seriously or credibly proposing storming Amazon HQ on socialist / communist grounds will get kicked off as well. Both to preserve the optics of fairness and because they should be. The only people left are those sharing pictures of their kids and food - and that’s actually fine by me. Political talk will remain, but stay non-violent, which doesn’t sound too bad.
  - zpeti 6y ago
    That will depend on how much resentment the food photo artists will feel. Plus a lot of social media companies start with fringe groups but then grow more mainstream over time. You are also assuming the censorship is only of people calling for violence. This morning Ron Paul's facebook page was blocked. I don't think he's ever called for violence. If the loudest voices on the left expand their definition is hate speech more and more, the less it is the fringe who get banned.
alisonkisk 6y ago
"vigilante" refers to illegally using powers (especially physical violence) that are reserved to police and not permitted to the general population. This is different from private organizations exercising their First Amendment rights to free association.
ralfn 6y ago
> But I don’t think I want to buy software from services that could just one day decide to stop serving me for an unclear reason So you hate SaaS. Potential unclear reasons can will and have included 'changing our focus', 'being acquired', 'fire your customer', etc. Im not entirely clear who would have any other expectation for any SaaS product.
koolk3ychain 6y ago
Yeah, at this rate I'm honestly waiting for the day that I, a staunch democrat, will get a letter from my bank, accountant etc that I'm being banned for white supremacy solely because I'm a bald skinny white guy. And being white / bald is enough to be considered a white supremacist - I went bald at 19 and it wasn't a choice. The gall of this fucking country is unbelievable - this is why we can't have nice things. And it goes without saying, racists and racial supremacists have no place in modern society!
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

_jal 6y ago

> for an unclear reason. I have no comment on the rest of your commentary, but the reason this happened is one of the few things in this story that is quite clear.

prepend 6y ago
I’m clear on why trump was banned. Clear that a coup was attempted and lots of people will, hopefully, be brought to justice. I’m not clear on why the RNC would be kicked off. I’m not being facetious, why was the RNC whatevered by Salesforce?
- matthewdgreen 6y ago
  According to this article [0], the reason given is that they were using Salesforce products to send fundraising emails that claimed the election was stolen. [0] https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2021/01/11/salesforce-says-it-has-taken-action-against-rnc-email-campaign-that-falsely-claims-election-fraud/ https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2021/01/11/salesforce-says...
  - prepend 6y ago
    “Hundreds of emails” seems like a poor reason to revoke all activities. It’s hard to say without seeing the actual text but unless they were saying to burn down the capitol, I don’t think political emails saying the election was stolen are noteworthy. This is based on my own experience of getting large numbers of spam letters making all sorts of stupid claims “Jane Doe is a terrorist” “Nancy Pelosi is going to take your guns” “Trump is going to put your kids in cages” “Biden will destroy America” While I would like to block all this crap, if Salesforce is going to drop RNC over “donate to us because the election is stolen” they they will need to drop many other people.
    - matthewdgreen 6y ago
      I don’t think the article says that Salesforce has permanently dropped the RNC. They may just have cut off access to some email capabilities, or even specific emails. And comparing this to other election email without context is disingenuous. If rioters had just stormed the Capitol building over some accusation the DNC was making, you can bet they’d be getting the same treatment.

Jonnax 6y ago

Any service you are a customer of have clauses with say that they terminate your service if they want. Republicans have fought for people's right to do so. If you recall the case of baker that didn't want to make a gay wedding cake. Now companies in the tech business are doing the same but to some of the groups that campaigned for that freedom. Sure there's some argument that Twitter and Facebook are giant monopolies in the social media space. But Salesforce? There's like a 1000 CRMs

secfirstmd 6y ago
True. And one big difference. You don't get to choose to be gay, have a disability or be from a minority or whatever. You do however choose to go to a Capital Hill riot or be complicit in supporting a dangerous man with autocratic tendencies.
- themaninthedark 6y ago
  You do however choose your religion and yet that is a protected class... This is not a road we should be going down.
jojobas 6y ago
Any CRM supplier that would dare to deal with RNC would be barraged on social media and lose other business. That sounds a lot like USSR.
- maxehmookau 6y ago
  At no point in human history has the USSR existed at the same time as modern social media.
- Jonnax 6y ago
  There's a difference between people giving them negative press and the USSR. One was a government and the other is random people saying "I'm not going to be your customer anymore" There's also plenty of open source CRMs they could deploy. If they're afraid of the cloud they could rent a dedicated server or colocate. I'm sure if they host in a very pro Republican state they wouldn't have issues. They could even host it in another country if they wanted to as well. They've got a lot of freedom

sneak 6y ago

I agree with this 100%, but also want to temper this with "this is nothing new". Your hosting/cloud was always willing to drop your ass the moment you made bad PR for them. This is one of many reasons I think going full lock-in on a proprietary cloud service that you can't ever self-host or migrate to a different cloud in a more favorable jurisdiction is crazy for a business that needs continuity. Who knows which way the wind blows in a quarter or a year or a decade? Take it from the porn industry: you have to be prepared to host it yourself one day.

Grustaf 6y ago
I think the new part is that they have started to censor anyone that is even vaguely conservative. Even open critics of Trump like Ron Paul, and now RNC. The end game is obviously that anyone that is not a woke liberal will be cancelled. For the good of the country of course.
- bitwize 6y ago
  > The end game is obviously that anyone that is not a woke liberal will be cancelled. You say "woke liberal", I say decent person. If you're an unrepentant asshole, you damn well should be cancelled!
  - Grustaf 6y ago
    So only woke liberals are “decent human beings”? Ron Paul is an “unrepentant asshole”?
    - bitwize 6y ago
      By current standards, a big part of human decency is putting the safety of the marginalized before the comfort of the privileged. Republicans as a whole have a very poor track record with that.
      - tomp 6y ago

soco 6y ago

Unclear reason you say? They don't want to be liable being used "in ways which could lead to further violence around the country’s presidential transition". And if one of your executives does something bad, it's quite customary for the company to be liable.

ImprobableTruth 6y ago
Do you mean 'responsible'? I don't see how they could possibly be held liable.
- soco 6y ago
  They who? Social media sites or companies with bad acting executives?

jtbayly 6y ago

It has already gotten to that point. It’s not a slippery slope argument, either. It’s already happened to one of the two most powerful groups in the US. On what basis do you think they would hesitate to cancel you?

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

jt2190 6y ago

> If they haven’t violated laws, and there’s no injunction then Salesforce is serving in the role of punisher. They very likely violated the terms of service of ExactTarget, their bulk email sender.

bitwize 6y ago

It's time for the Republican Party to be legally banned -- the same way the Germans banned the Nazis after WWII and the Russians banned the Soviet Communist Party after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Failing that, however, it is altogether proper for private entities to neutralize the Republicans and not give them a bit of oxygen -- in the interests of preventing further violence and undermining of the democratic process.

mkohlmyr 6y ago
The complete lack of sense of scale that is on display when making comparisons between either of those and a one-term clown who will go down as a footnote in history is borderline disturbing. Get some perspective.
- bitwize 6y ago
  The Republican Party has, for fifty years, been the party of hate and white supremacy. The Republicans would've faded into history after Kennedy and Johnson incorporated civil rights into the Democratic platform had Nixon's aides not developed the strategy of winning enough votes to be a contender by appealing to all the disgruntled ex-Democrat racists. As a result, the Republican base has been a bunch of far-right loons who fantasize about overthrowing the government for much of that time. This was true long before Trump ever seriously considered politics. Trump just exposed it for what it was, making the American far right feel that finally they were being listened to, finally they were in control. And by approving the insurrection against the government, he accidentally got them to show their true colors. See, I was there the last time an idiosyncratic tycoon had a go at the White House and galvanized the right, namely Ross Perot. He roused the right wing from its malaise and, inadvertently, created the conditions of rage and hatred that led to Timothy McVeigh. So you're right -- Trump is just a footnote. The hatred he stirred up is much bigger than him.
  - salawat 6y ago
    The Democrats right now are coming off as willing to sacrifice civil liberties wholesale to ensure their own power. This has gone far beyond "a return to sensibility". When you start outsourcing unconstitutional behavior to the private sector, I see issues. Then again, in a twisted sort of way, I'm 100% a large chunk of the population has just given everyone ample evidence they are not to be trusted. I'm sad it's come to that for us as a nation, but it's galvanized me to work with the handful of people I hold close to start building up Nexii of good business. So there is that. The American Ideal, and the values we're supposed to stand up for do not look like how people are acting right now. The rest of the world is watching this meltdown, and our wholesale burning ofany high ground we managed to achieve, and well... That's it. Sad to see is all.

zpeti 6y ago

So, medium and long term, what's the plan here (in the market)? Are we going to have "Republican Friendly" services for everything? CRM? Social media? Patreon alternative? App stores?? Seems like the market at some point is going to step in here and serve - wait for it - about half the country, 150m people. (and then let's not forget about the rest of the world, who probably don't want to get involved in US politics, and aren't particularly happy seeing the interference of silicon valley companies in everything - see Merkel and France's ministers statement in the last few days).

sudhirj 6y ago
That seems unlikely. Remember that we’re talking about the fringe here - Republican grandparents looking at pictures of their kids and sharing broccoli casserole recipes are not getting kicked off FB or Twitter. Neither are those discussing pickup trucks, beer, blue jeans, Jesus or even guns, to a certain extent. The fringe is much smaller, and serving them profitably is very difficult. It’ll have to be volunteer sites like the N-Chans. The remaining people on social networks are the centrists. You could argue that the extreme left will also be booted off soon, if not already. Anyone seriously or credibly proposing storming Amazon HQ on socialist / communist grounds will get kicked off as well. Both to preserve the optics of fairness and because they should be. The only people left are those sharing pictures of their kids and food - and that’s actually fine by me. Political talk will remain, but stay non-violent, which doesn’t sound too bad.
- zpeti 6y ago
  That will depend on how much resentment the food photo artists will feel. Plus a lot of social media companies start with fringe groups but then grow more mainstream over time. You are also assuming the censorship is only of people calling for violence. This morning Ron Paul's facebook page was blocked. I don't think he's ever called for violence. If the loudest voices on the left expand their definition is hate speech more and more, the less it is the fringe who get banned.

alisonkisk 6y ago

"vigilante" refers to illegally using powers (especially physical violence) that are reserved to police and not permitted to the general population. This is different from private organizations exercising their First Amendment rights to free association.

ralfn 6y ago

> But I don’t think I want to buy software from services that could just one day decide to stop serving me for an unclear reason So you hate SaaS. Potential unclear reasons can will and have included 'changing our focus', 'being acquired', 'fire your customer', etc. Im not entirely clear who would have any other expectation for any SaaS product.

koolk3ychain 6y ago

Yeah, at this rate I'm honestly waiting for the day that I, a staunch democrat, will get a letter from my bank, accountant etc that I'm being banned for white supremacy solely because I'm a bald skinny white guy. And being white / bald is enough to be considered a white supremacist - I went bald at 19 and it wasn't a choice. The gall of this fucking country is unbelievable - this is why we can't have nice things. And it goes without saying, racists and racial supremacists have no place in modern society!

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]