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Comment by jessaustin | Hacker News Reader

In April of 2018, when Vice Magazine’s lawyers pressured Patreon to drop my account, I had no other options that would enable me to keep my YouTube channel going.

ZOMG that's so evil! She complained that you didn't respect her desire to remain anonymous, so you destroy her livelihood? Why would any source trust Vice to safeguard her anonymity or indeed to do anything they promised after this saga of shitty behavior? Answer: they rely on sources not knowing anything about them, because after all the sources don't have the iron control of the social media "conversation" that Western journalists have.

[EDIT: removed speculation]

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Well, ok, but why did Patreon agree to drop her account? That seems like important context.

Patreon's deplatforming policies are capricious and draconian because they have to keep financial partners happy, and the policies of those partners are capricious and draconian. Those with enough social media and commercial power can deal (in fact if TFA is believed it appears they can actually steer the machine of injustice). The author of TFA cannot deal, which is the entire point of TFA. We always knew in our hearts that "twitter as help desk" was unjust at some level. This is a concrete example of that.

[EDIT:] Now that I've read to the end of TFA, she buried the lede! This woman has been subject to so much shitty behavior! She was the third customer of a Patreon competitor, "SubscribeStar", and one of their largest customers, so the bastards just shut down the entire site. Now it appears that it's back up: https://www.subscribestar.com/posts/7863

Again, okay, but which specific deplatforming policy did they use in this case?

Covered here: http://medium.com/@therealsexycyborg/shenzhen-tech-girl-naom...

I have a solution to your Patreon issues, see my other comment below. I would be very interested in talking to you if collecting Ethereum is an alternative you are considering.

https://www.subscribestar.com/naomi-wu

Here’s another, better alternative, that actually works, right now.

Because Wu doxxed some of the journalists in retaliation.

Absolutely was not retaliation.

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