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Comment by hakfoo | Hacker News Reader

What makes the 'deplatforming' threat viable is that so many critical aspects of an online business are a choice between private-enterprise players. Stripe or Authorize.net. AWS or DigitalOcean. GoDaddy or Namecheap.

As you suggest, they have no individual legal obligation to serve a business that may cause bad press/high risk/whatever. But when you can enough of them pointing in the same direction, it creates the chilling effect-- a business that's technically legal but can't get the services they need. It basically creates am unspoken private regulation well beyond the actual law of the state.

I tend to think the answer might be non-profit or state-run "service providers of last resort" -- charter-bound to provide service for any legal purpose, no matter how distasteful. Not necessarily cheap or slick, but they won't pull your plug because people complain about your content. Such a provider would defang the deplatforming strategy pretty fast.

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Ah, state-hosted platforms calling for the extermination of Jews. It's not exactly Radio Free Europe, is it?

> it creates the chilling effect-- a business that's technically legal but can't get the services they need

They can get it, but have to pay for that. Just like the porn industry had to build their own payment providers.

The chilling effect is working as intended. You need something in society to make people find common ground and live in a similar reality. The current US seems like a great example of people not being able to do so. They blame more and more blame other side for their problems. And i wonder if that trend can be reversed before you guys start shooting each other.

Recent developments like social media made and the US TV landscape make it easier than ever to live in your favorite filter bubble. Algorithms getting better and better at giving you what you want to hear. I don't see developments emerging to counteract that.

If de-platforming is bullet we have to bite for society to keep functioning, than so be it. It's still somewhat mild tool you can work around... i take that over government intervention any time.

>They can get it, but have to pay for that. Just like the porn industry had to build their own payment providers.

There are two problems with that argument.

First, it's nowhere near as trivial as you make it sound. A one man shop could potentially build and maintain a custom forum service himself, but trying to create a real-world ready payment processing infrastructure from scratch is going to mean a team of tens of specialists.

The porn industry was able to solve it because it was a big, industry-wide problem that left a lot of money on the table-- a need big enough to create a market for specialists.

Second, it may not be possible to bypass every firm that presents a deplatforming risk. The porn industry may have avoided rejection by the mainstream gateway providers, but they're still dependent on retaining good relationsips with Visa and Mastercard at the end of the day. I'd think those guys are the nuclear option for deplatforming-- no matter who you line up to take your payments, if you can't accept 90% of the cards on the market, you're not going to be able to monetize effectively.

I don't want my tax money used for that. Not because I object to the content, but because it's a waste of money and government officials have more important things to focus on.

I'd love to see Republican senators voting to fund an antifa 24/7 channel. I mean, they can't even get behind Sesame Street so I'm sure that wouldn't be a problem.

> But when you can enough of them pointing in the same direction, it creates the chilling effect-- a business that's technically legal but can't get the services they need. It basically creates am unspoken private regulation well beyond the actual law of the state.

Yes, but this is how the free market works. That my $.25 artisanal dog cupcake business can't get the services it needs at the price I can afford doesn't raise complaints.

But when we replace dog cupcakes with Nazi chat rooms, suddenly we need the government to step in and subsidize a business which the market has shown is not worth it. In economic terms, the "distaste" of a client is an externality, and there is an increase in price associated with that externality. If the company can't afford it that's just the market at work. So the government providing a platform like this is just the government subsidizing business with negative externalities that the free market was correct tly pricing. It's like subsidies for strip mining or fracking or rhino poaching. But this is something you support in this case.

It's odd to me.

> I tend to think the answer might be non-profit or state-run "service providers of last resort" -- charter-bound to provide service for any legal purpose, no matter how distasteful.

And what if my distateful venture needs redis or windows 10 or a spanner like distributed database, or whatever other service your unflashy system doesn't provide?

Then either I can't get off the ground anyway, or you require that the government service maintain feature parity with all the others, neither of which seems viable.

>> That my $.25 artisanal dog cupcake business can't get the services it needs at the price I can afford doesn't raise complaints.

If you can't get services you need at any price isn't that when competition authorities [ought to] start investigating?

The is no evidence that Gab can't find a price at which to run its service. Again: even Stormfront is still up and running. And Stormfront is just Gab without the pretend rules forbidding threats and harassment.

So, once again, "Are you willing to compel Stripe by threat of force to keep processing credit cards for nazis?"

In the 1950s, your question would've been "Are you willing to compel Stripe by threat of force to keep processing credit cards for leftists and commies?" You believe because your political faction has a little leverage currently that it will always remain that way; not so. If you legitimize deplatforming, it is a weapon that will someday be turned against you.

Given the unwelcome resurgence of the right worldwide, that day may come sooner than you think.

If memory serves, at least in the US this was the opposite. The free market was fine with serving least wing groups. It was the government that stepped in and told individuals to not be leftist, under threat of force.

Only then did businesses stop associating with those people, because the government was implicitly threatening them.

It was exactly the government's interference that caused the deplatforming of potential leftists during the red scare.

The government isn't an entity with its own independent will; the US public broadly voted in officials that put in place those policies. Leftists who openly identified as such faced all sorts of problems doing business even without government intervention.

Hollywood blacklists, the most famous example from the red scare, only began after HUAC subpoenaed and held people in contempt.

You're just repeating the same invalid argument. Go and look up the history of widespread small scale anti-lefist incidents in that era that occurred before the HUAC existed.

The onus is on you to provide examples. Most of what I know of, and what I can find documented, was government sanctioned or under (implied) threat of government retaliation.

Please cite examples of these widespread small scale, grassroots anti-leftist incidents.

"Somebody someone else really doesn't like" != Nazi

When we start throwing that word around, along with describing groups as "far right" (or indeed "far left") when they've started getting more votes than the [previously] mainstream groupings, we appear have a problem with nomenclature.[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hessian_state_election,_2018 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bavarian_state_election,_2018 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_presidential_election,_... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austrian_legislative_election,...

I assume that you have a proposal that would differentiate between the two? So that they would be forced to serve "somebody someone else really doesn't like", but not be forced to serve Nazis?

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