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It's interesting to see the comments from people who supported Youtube/Twitter/FB/Patreon/Visa political censorship, but are suddenly against the porn censorshi

It's interesting to see the comments from people who supported Youtube/Twitter/FB/Patreon/Visa political censorship, but are suddenly against the porn censorship by the payment same systems. "Rules for thee, but not for me."

archildress 5y ago
There are compelling alternatives for many of the platforms you mention; what was happening to OF amounted to a complete disqualification from infrastructure.
- prestigious 5y ago
  Insanely wrong, the opposite in fact. Hard to be this wrong on the internet tbh
- bufferoverflow 5y ago
  There are no popular alternatives to Youtube and Twitter. The number of users is important, and they have monopolies on the user base. Learn about network effects.
  - archildress 5y ago
    I'm sorry but your analogy just doesn't work. If you're de-platformed from YouTube, Facebook, etc, you can still publish your content and share it. You have a distribution issue, you don't have an "ability to perform" issue. If you're locked out of the banking system, your business is done. You lack transactional alternatives.
JohnJamesRambo 5y ago
A girl pleasuring herself isn’t the same thing as encouraging people to storm the White House and overthrow democracy, I’m confused why you would interpolate the two. It is just more fuel for the argument that America has always been so uncomfortable and Puritan with sex and way too comfortable with violence.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- jsiepkes 5y ago
  > A girl pleasuring herself isn’t the same thing as encouraging people to storm the White House and overthrow democracy That comparison doesn't work because calling to storm the Whitehouse is calling on people to perform an illegal act which is illegal by itself. I think everyone is in agreement that platforms should remove content that is illegal.
  - wilde 5y ago
    The content that encouraged people to storm Congress didn’t contain overtly illegal overtures. And yet that’s what happened, relatively predictably from the scenario.
  - FranksTV 5y ago
    I mean it does work, because that's exactly the difference they were pointing out.
  - rvz 5y ago
    > I think everyone is in agreement that platforms should remove content that is illegal. Yes. Including child pornography that Twitter seems to find it difficult to remove off of their platform. [0] [1] [2] [0] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/6/30/india-twitter-kashmir-map-child-pornography https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/6/30/india-twitter-kashm... [1] https://www.courthousenews.com/judge-rules-twitter-can-be-sued-for-failing-to-take-down-child-porn-videos/ https://www.courthousenews.com/judge-rules-twitter-can-be-su... [2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-08-20/twitter-faces-claim-it-benefited-from-child-sex-trafficking https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-08-20/twitter-f...
- 1MachineElf 5y ago
  Calling on people to storm the capitol and over throw democracy isn't the same as protesting politicians who refuse to take allegations of election tampering seriously, and yet people with censorship powers keep insisting that the former is what January 6th was about.
toomuchtodo 5y ago
Payments are like water and electricity, utilities, and should be regulated as such. If you’re not breaking the law, interfering with legal payments should be a sanctionable offense by regulators. Social platforms are not utilities, nor is my blog and its comment section. This speaks to the need for censor proof payments systems that can still accommodate KYC and AML requirements (so you’re not violating financial regs and end up closing up shop). Stablecoins perhaps? I leave that to the domain experts. TLDR Disintermediate legacy payment systems without breaking the law.
- lmz 5y ago
  There's always interbank transfers / ACH as long as they have bank accounts. It's a pain to use though.
  - toomuchtodo 5y ago
    So the Fed is rolling out Instant Payments (“Instant ACH”) in 2023, but I did not mention that as it’s to be seen how or if payments are censored passing through that platform.
- imtringued 5y ago
  Money is definitively a public good. If money were a private good provided by banks then banks wouldn't trust each other's money. Each bank would have their own currency.
vidarh 5y ago
There is a difference between a platform that can be easily replaced choosing not to serve certain content, and infrastructure providers choosing to deny service. I'm all for Twitter choosing what they will allow - if anything the more aggressive they are, the more space it creates for competition. I'm on the other hand not for payment providers even being allowed to choose, because their position then makes them effective arbiter of what kinds of businesses are allowed to exist without democratic oversight. For all the power the social networks have, it's nothing like that. Maybe crypto will change that, but today threatening to withdraw payment processing is an existential threat for a lot of online businesses which gives payment networks undue power.
- luckylion 5y ago
  In this case, OnlyFans made the choice (and reversed it), not the payment provider. Granted, they did it because of the payment provider, but Twitter etc don't make their decisions in a vacuum either, they react to different kinds of pressure. That said, the same people made the same arguments ("private businesses, no rules should apply") with payment providers boycotting Gab, but turn around now. Will they learn that political pressure via businesses is a bad idea because it might affect them next? Doubtful, they haven't learned it the first few times.
  - vidarh 5y ago
    Onlyfans made the "choice" the way someone with a gun to their head makes a "choice". It's meaningless to suggest they had one. And I'm a concrete example of someone who considers Gab a haven of extremism, but who still believes payment processors should not be allowed to boycott legal businesses.
    - luckylion 5y ago
      Sure, just as Twitter, Facebook and the cloud providers make a "choice" when they ban someone who has become a persona non grata in the establishment media. Nobody does anything out of ideology at that level, it's all damage control. The WSJ imagines pewdiepie to be Hitler incarnate? Advertisers pull their ads and Disney has to cut ties. Not because they think pewdiepie is a Nazi, but because there's only one "choice". This is nothing new, it's been done before, but it hurts a different group this time, so the people who celebrated these same actions are now angry that this kind of thing is allowed to happen.
version_five 5y ago
People are capable of infinite mental gymnastics when it comes to justifying why rules or oppression/suppression they like are different from ones they don't like. There is the often repeated "imagine your worst enemy had this power" but it doesn't seem to get through to people.
rvz 5y ago
Also the same ones who repeated the 'private platform argument' now don't like it when several 'other private platforms' ban or don't want to do business with OnlyFans because it hurts those who use it for a living, especially those who have 'pornographic content'. Exactly the same thing how YouTube demonetises specific individuals who use the platform for a living for content that is skewed to a certain political audience. Do they now realise that this can happen to anyone? As for payment solutions, this is the whole point of cryptocurrencies that will solve this eventually.
spacebear 5y ago
Many sex workers have been warning against political censorship for exactly this reason: https://thehill.com/policy/technology/532137-sex-workers-warn-of-unintended-consequences-in-section-230-fight https://thehill.com/policy/technology/532137-sex-workers-war...
enumjorge 5y ago
> people who supported… political censorship That’s a pretty loaded statement. It’s strange to me that someone can take a provable fact (e.g. COVID-19 is real), politicize it, and now spreading that misinformation is painted as political speech that should be protected.
- version_five 5y ago
  Right, the "other people should stop politicizing it and just do what I say" argument
polote 5y ago
> It's interesting to see the comments from people who supported [..] but are suddenly against it ... I hate this argument, it is so easy to say: people were against before and they are in favor now. Without proving that the people who were against are the SAME people that are in favor of it. For example, people wanted mask at the beginning and now they don't wear them. People support Facebook censorship but are against when it is for porn. People wanted a vaccine but now they dont want to take it. People protested against motorbike sounds yesterday and they protest in favor of motorbikes today Sorry but what tell you that they are the same people ? Without that this is just wrong

archildress 5y ago

There are compelling alternatives for many of the platforms you mention; what was happening to OF amounted to a complete disqualification from infrastructure.

prestigious 5y ago
Insanely wrong, the opposite in fact. Hard to be this wrong on the internet tbh
bufferoverflow 5y ago
There are no popular alternatives to Youtube and Twitter. The number of users is important, and they have monopolies on the user base. Learn about network effects.
- archildress 5y ago
  I'm sorry but your analogy just doesn't work. If you're de-platformed from YouTube, Facebook, etc, you can still publish your content and share it. You have a distribution issue, you don't have an "ability to perform" issue. If you're locked out of the banking system, your business is done. You lack transactional alternatives.

JohnJamesRambo 5y ago

A girl pleasuring herself isn’t the same thing as encouraging people to storm the White House and overthrow democracy, I’m confused why you would interpolate the two. It is just more fuel for the argument that America has always been so uncomfortable and Puritan with sex and way too comfortable with violence.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
jsiepkes 5y ago
> A girl pleasuring herself isn’t the same thing as encouraging people to storm the White House and overthrow democracy That comparison doesn't work because calling to storm the Whitehouse is calling on people to perform an illegal act which is illegal by itself. I think everyone is in agreement that platforms should remove content that is illegal.
- wilde 5y ago
  The content that encouraged people to storm Congress didn’t contain overtly illegal overtures. And yet that’s what happened, relatively predictably from the scenario.
- FranksTV 5y ago
  I mean it does work, because that's exactly the difference they were pointing out.
- rvz 5y ago
  > I think everyone is in agreement that platforms should remove content that is illegal. Yes. Including child pornography that Twitter seems to find it difficult to remove off of their platform. [0] [1] [2] [0] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/6/30/india-twitter-kashmir-map-child-pornography https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/6/30/india-twitter-kashm... [1] https://www.courthousenews.com/judge-rules-twitter-can-be-sued-for-failing-to-take-down-child-porn-videos/ https://www.courthousenews.com/judge-rules-twitter-can-be-su... [2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-08-20/twitter-faces-claim-it-benefited-from-child-sex-trafficking https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-08-20/twitter-f...
1MachineElf 5y ago
Calling on people to storm the capitol and over throw democracy isn't the same as protesting politicians who refuse to take allegations of election tampering seriously, and yet people with censorship powers keep insisting that the former is what January 6th was about.

toomuchtodo 5y ago

Payments are like water and electricity, utilities, and should be regulated as such. If you’re not breaking the law, interfering with legal payments should be a sanctionable offense by regulators. Social platforms are not utilities, nor is my blog and its comment section. This speaks to the need for censor proof payments systems that can still accommodate KYC and AML requirements (so you’re not violating financial regs and end up closing up shop). Stablecoins perhaps? I leave that to the domain experts. TLDR Disintermediate legacy payment systems without breaking the law.

lmz 5y ago
There's always interbank transfers / ACH as long as they have bank accounts. It's a pain to use though.
- toomuchtodo 5y ago
  So the Fed is rolling out Instant Payments (“Instant ACH”) in 2023, but I did not mention that as it’s to be seen how or if payments are censored passing through that platform.
imtringued 5y ago
Money is definitively a public good. If money were a private good provided by banks then banks wouldn't trust each other's money. Each bank would have their own currency.

vidarh 5y ago

There is a difference between a platform that can be easily replaced choosing not to serve certain content, and infrastructure providers choosing to deny service. I'm all for Twitter choosing what they will allow - if anything the more aggressive they are, the more space it creates for competition. I'm on the other hand not for payment providers even being allowed to choose, because their position then makes them effective arbiter of what kinds of businesses are allowed to exist without democratic oversight. For all the power the social networks have, it's nothing like that. Maybe crypto will change that, but today threatening to withdraw payment processing is an existential threat for a lot of online businesses which gives payment networks undue power.

luckylion 5y ago
In this case, OnlyFans made the choice (and reversed it), not the payment provider. Granted, they did it because of the payment provider, but Twitter etc don't make their decisions in a vacuum either, they react to different kinds of pressure. That said, the same people made the same arguments ("private businesses, no rules should apply") with payment providers boycotting Gab, but turn around now. Will they learn that political pressure via businesses is a bad idea because it might affect them next? Doubtful, they haven't learned it the first few times.
- vidarh 5y ago
  Onlyfans made the "choice" the way someone with a gun to their head makes a "choice". It's meaningless to suggest they had one. And I'm a concrete example of someone who considers Gab a haven of extremism, but who still believes payment processors should not be allowed to boycott legal businesses.
  - luckylion 5y ago
    Sure, just as Twitter, Facebook and the cloud providers make a "choice" when they ban someone who has become a persona non grata in the establishment media. Nobody does anything out of ideology at that level, it's all damage control. The WSJ imagines pewdiepie to be Hitler incarnate? Advertisers pull their ads and Disney has to cut ties. Not because they think pewdiepie is a Nazi, but because there's only one "choice". This is nothing new, it's been done before, but it hurts a different group this time, so the people who celebrated these same actions are now angry that this kind of thing is allowed to happen.

version_five 5y ago

People are capable of infinite mental gymnastics when it comes to justifying why rules or oppression/suppression they like are different from ones they don't like. There is the often repeated "imagine your worst enemy had this power" but it doesn't seem to get through to people.

rvz 5y ago

Also the same ones who repeated the 'private platform argument' now don't like it when several 'other private platforms' ban or don't want to do business with OnlyFans because it hurts those who use it for a living, especially those who have 'pornographic content'. Exactly the same thing how YouTube demonetises specific individuals who use the platform for a living for content that is skewed to a certain political audience. Do they now realise that this can happen to anyone? As for payment solutions, this is the whole point of cryptocurrencies that will solve this eventually.

spacebear 5y ago

Many sex workers have been warning against political censorship for exactly this reason: https://thehill.com/policy/technology/532137-sex-workers-warn-of-unintended-consequences-in-section-230-fight https://thehill.com/policy/technology/532137-sex-workers-war...

enumjorge 5y ago

> people who supported… political censorship That’s a pretty loaded statement. It’s strange to me that someone can take a provable fact (e.g. COVID-19 is real), politicize it, and now spreading that misinformation is painted as political speech that should be protected.

version_five 5y ago
Right, the "other people should stop politicizing it and just do what I say" argument

polote 5y ago

> It's interesting to see the comments from people who supported [..] but are suddenly against it ... I hate this argument, it is so easy to say: people were against before and they are in favor now. Without proving that the people who were against are the SAME people that are in favor of it. For example, people wanted mask at the beginning and now they don't wear them. People support Facebook censorship but are against when it is for porn. People wanted a vaccine but now they dont want to take it. People protested against motorbike sounds yesterday and they protest in favor of motorbikes today Sorry but what tell you that they are the same people ? Without that this is just wrong