Stripe bans Trump campaign | Hacker News Reader

Stripe bans Trump campaign

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673 pointsbenguillet916 comments

For those who haven't seen any of my annoying mentions of it yet, large threads on HN are currently paginated for performance reasons (yes we're working on it) so you need to click More at the bottom of the thread to get to the rest of the comments—or like this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25722027&p=2

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25722027&p=3

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25722027&p=4

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25722027&p=5

There is a difference between bank accounts, Visa/MasterCard access and Internet service, on one hand, and App Stores, Twitter accounts and payment providers, on the other hand.

The First Amendment promises both free speech and free assembly. Core to the latter is the freedom not to assemble. This freedom is regulated. You can’t refuse to do business with protected classes. But political affiliation is not a protected class.

There are utilities, which have limited freedom not to assemble. Then there are private persons and private businesses. Stripe and Twitter are clearly the latter. AWS and Visa feel like the former, though they are legally the latter.

The cost of switching private activity to a utility model is a loss of innovation and an increase in political involvement. We are re-evaluating, as a society, the balance between the freedoms of speech and assembly. Let’s not forget these are freedoms in balance, not a spectrum of tyranny and anarchy.

> Stripe and Twitter are pretty clearly the latter.

They might be the latter, but I wouldn't consider it obvious. Regarding social media, we've gotten to the point where even US Visa applications ask for social media handles (and I understand they consider it as a negative datum if you don't provide one). And we're also at the point where some companies won't provide you with respectable service unless you @ them on social media. Regarding payment platforms, generally people expect them to be quite neutral, since getting locked out of the financial system is not exactly going to lead to a great life in the modern digital economy.

I don't know at what point these cross into "utility" territory, and I'm willing to entertain the idea that they might never do so, but I find it quite debatable and very much not clear.

(Note: None of this is to opine on the reactions to this particular incident. Just commenting on the more general idea.)

I'm confused, payment processors often stop working with criminals, or even non-criminals that are just in "unseemly" industries. PayPal arbitrarily freezes people's accounts for even possibly being scams, why not obvious billion dollar ones?

I have never thought they were neutral when it came to actual crimes. That's so much liability, why would anyone expect them to take it on given how risk averse they are?

I buy this argument as the law currently stands, but this is also such a moral double standard (Colorado bakery for instance).

Also, how far do we go with this reasoning? Stripe and PayPal refuse service so they're supposed to "Go build their own" (it costs billions to create a new service like stripe or PayPal that can compare). AWS shut you down? Build your own data center... (Again, costs millions or billions). What if next Intel or AMD decides to not sell you processors? Go build your own fab and develop your own hardware? What if the silicon miners won't sell you silicon, are you now supposed to go build your own mine?

The issue isn't that companies have a right to do it, it's that there are no viables alternatives to these large duopolies, and that "creating your own" is not an alternative.

What happens if the party in power next decides to attack religious organizations who congregate during that pandemic with the same type of concerted de-platforming? What if it's people who advocate against raising taxes who are next as deemed "morally corrupt"?

It's not hard to imagine this type of anti competitive, semi-concerted effort to de platform a new company being targeted at other things in the future. We need laws to catch up to our modern society and either break up the monopolies or put a lot more protections around the types of discrimination that are illegal, which should include political affiliation (this is law in California for employment discrimination so it's not that far fetched of an idea).

> But political affiliation is not a protected class.

Classes that are protected now, were not protected at some point.

I think the discussion revolves not around whether political affiliation is a protected class, but whether it should be, in a sense- whether what is going on is good or bad for society, not whether or not it is illegal.

You are entitled to believe that it is good, of course.

I feel that right now, there's a lot of people conflating the status quo with the way they think things ought to be.

I've seen a lot of comments that act authoritative about the legal consequences, but heavily editorialized to say "the government shouldn't".

I'm not going to state my personal stance, because it's complicated and frankly, I haven't put enough thought into it to be comfortable presenting it. But, you (the reader) should be willing to forgo your kneejerk reaction (if you have one) and think about the consequences of what you're proposing when discussing changing the status quo and desired legislature to "solve" these issues.

Freedom of speech was created when there were many distributed newspapers. If one newspaper decided not to publish your piece, you could go to another. There was not a cabal of newspapers that controlled 99% of information distribution, like do Twitter, Facebook, and Google. This is not something the founders ever could have foreseen.

For all intents and purposes, freedom of speech has flatlined in America. What will bring it back?

> But political affiliation is not a protected class.

This is a distraction. Political speech enjoys the highest level of protection in the US, political speech is one of the primary motivators behind the existence of constitutionally protected speech in the US.

Non-US-citizen here: Isn't the first amendment protecting private people and entities (e.g. newspapers) from government influence into free speech?

Private companies deciding not to service the head of the executive seems to be nearly the opposite of that, unless I understood this wrongly (which is entirely possible). Think of a newspaper (=private entity) decides to boycott a president and not write anything about him. Wouldn't it be the polar opposite of free speech if the president then had the power to force them to write about him?

I get that a payment service is not the same as a newspaper, but it is still a private entity.

"We are re-evaluating" - I imagine for many people it's not re-evaluation but learning for the first time, people who haven't critically thought through any of this - of what freedom of speech means and its boundaries or how the relative sovereignty of private businesses is a feature, and it's not you being persecuted if they remove unwanted users; the private companies aren't preventing free speech, these people can still speak freely in America and on the internet - just not on the platforms that don't want the incitement of violence, etc. on their platform.

> AWS and Visa feel like the former, though they are legally the latter.

Back in the day, you had to rack your own servers in your own data centers and manage them yourself. Had any of these 'free speech' services spent any time considering how reliant they were on 3rd party services, they should never have engaged those companies in the first place.

There was a day when you had to build your own servers to host your own websites. Not that long ago, imo.

> But political affiliation is not a protected class.

Just FYI, some countries have made it a protected class, e.g.: https://www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/1993/0082/latest/... (see 21(1)(j))

It is incredible that people on HN can be against Visa/Mastercard banning payments to Wikileaks or Pornhub, against PayPal making arbitrary decisions about their customers, but somehow in support of Stripe banning Trump. All of these companies are providing utility services, and they should all be regulated as if they were public agencies. They should have to uphold the freedom of speech and other principles enshrined in our system of laws, because these organizations are so powerful and influential that they might as well be government agencies. The services they provide are completely fundamental and necessary today, and the fact that they are operated by private entities does not mean that we cannot require them to do what is right by implementing our nation's founding principles. If we can regulate power utilities or force all businesses to shutdown during a pandemic, we can absolutely update our laws to regulate these companies, require them to uphold the first amendment, and provide due process. We should also definitely revamp our anti-trust laws and break them up where possible, so that there is real competition and choice.

> You can’t refuse to do business with protected classes. But political affiliation is not a protected class.

FYI, political affiliation is protected from discrimination in CA, NY, and DC.

https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/can-employers-discri...

When we're talking tech giants, like Google, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, and so forth, it strains credulity to think that there isn't some connection between what they do and currying political favor. Politicians are holding a big hammer over the heads of these giants, in terms of laws, regulations, and even tax and trade policy. On paper, they are private enterprises making decisions that are within their right, as opposed to governments censoring speech and prohibiting association. The reality is almost certainly more complicated, and involves nuanced levels of political pull, "understandings," and backroom deals.

These tech giants have made themselves into a lattice on which modern society attaches itself, and their pervasiveness will only continue to grow in 21st century America. We risk them being in bed with government. And when nominally private, major industry is aligned with government to effect political ends, there's a word for that, and we've seen that before.

To be honest, I firmly evaluate this behavior as negative irrespectable of the legal issues. It might look clear in the case of Trump. Freedom of speech is something civil society defines and the refusal to let people speak is something I regard very negatively. Never would have thought to say something like this in 2015, but the opposition to Trump looks inept as does this behavior from Stripe. They just didn't have an answer, so they just needed to ban him.

The spectrum is authoritarianism and anarchy. Anarchists can still be tyrannical.

How is AWS anything like an “utility”? There are hundreds of viable hosting options for large sites.

Very well said. The critical point is that society is constantly balancing different factors. Sometimes, the balance has been good enough for long enough that we don't even see it. We were in that situation until Trump arrived. During that time, we grew accustomed to talking about our liberties in a way that lacks any depth or nuance.

If Visa is a "utility," why are we clutching pearls when Trump is banned by them, but not Pornhub?

Stripe isn't preventing the Trump campaign from fundraising. You can feel free to withdraw cash from your bank account and mail it to the Trump campaign. Stripe also isn't prohibiting all Republicans from using Stripe. It seems that the people claiming that this the end of free speech are unaware that demonstrating that freedom of speech can have consequences. In this case, that free speech was arguably inciting an insurrection.

> But political affiliation is not a protected class.

Perhaps these bans are happening not because of political affiliation but due to the messages these particular people (e.g., Trump) are espousing.

Parler go banned because it's full of message calling for (e.g.) Mike Pence to be hanged and other such things, and Parler isn't / can't do much about it, and its infrastructure providers (AWS, app stores) do not want any part of it per their ToS.

No one has cut off Mitch McConnell because he hasn't been calling forth angry mobs to storm Congress (or the White House).

>>But political affiliation is not a protected class.

Pretty sure it is in California.

The assumption that a government model would cause a loss of innovation seems dismissive of what the government model has brought us in the past (DARPA, Space Program, nuclear energy, etc., etc.)

> But political affiliation is not a protected class.

The ongoing purge -- would it not be seen as treason, as an act to in fact subvert/weaken a position of POTUS and therefore directly destabilize the US government?

> Then there are private persons and private businesses. Stripe and Twitter are clearly the latter. AWS and Visa feel like the former, though they are legally the latter.

Twitter and Stripe are acting in coordination - literally conspiring - with every other big tech company to take a specific action. When they do that they're acting as an illegal cartel and must be prosecuted accordingly. This is the kind of coordinated cartel behavior that banana republics and third world countries have that behave exactly like these companies are and do so out in the open (and always with the political support of the group with the most power, to target their foes). We're supposed to have anti-trust laws to deal with conspiring mega corporations.

I was on the fence about this, but reading the comments convinced me it was the absolute right decision.

The fact that all these institutions just allowed this horrible hateful speech for four years, in the name of free speech etc, despite all the harassment, harm (mental and otherwise) it caused to so many people in America actually emboldened so many to the extent that now that they crossed this invisible line, they can't even really understand the ramifications of what happened. That what gets me.

To be hyperfocused on the free speech or "big brother" aspect of these bans, not the fact that a small group of rioters were just a few feet away from irreversibly staining American history with the blood of the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th in the chain of command of the United states of America, as well as overrunning the seat of power of the most powerful nation in the world, on national TV ... just tells me that things really went too far and should have been shut down much sooner.

I'm sure a lot of the people at the capitol that day have the narrative running in their minds that they are the heroes of America democracy, but the reality is that there is simply no justification for any of this, that can be told. A smarter group of individuals would take all this on the chin, make penance in some way while staying under the radar to regroup and reconfigure their message/approach instead of citing private business overreach as some sort of justification for what happened

Your point about the 'invisible line' is astute. We're in a crisis of perception and reality right now, and this has caused many to lose sight of the very real lines that we have agreed upon to preserve society and democracy.

I think the other important factor here is we are in a very vulnerable moment right now because we are in the midst of a transition of power. It takes time to transfer the apparatus and operations of state, and during this time there is a power vacuum that can be taken advantage of by adversaries foreign and domestic. Every state throughout history has struggled in these times.

The failure to secure the Capitol was in no small part due to how the President has run the state in the waning months of his term. His cabinet and administration are running a skeleton crew, he's acting erratically, and he's making false claims about election results and inciting crowds in a bid to stay in power. Whether one supports his policies or not, it should be abundantly clear right now that his actions and rhetoric put the country in further danger during this vulnerable time, and that perhaps he need not have access to platforms that make this easier and more convenient. It should be hard to dismantle the state, to whip people into a frenzy, to cause the damage that has been caused.

I feel like your analysis misses the forest for the trees.

Even if Facebook, Twitter, etc, had banned all these platforms and politicians, I'm confident people still would have come out for the protest. Taking away people's ability to organize on mainstream platforms didn't stop the HK protestors from organizing against the CCP. The lack of online platforms didn't stop the Color Revolutions in Eastern Europe. Even the Arab Spring, while often attributed to Twitter, happened in the face of mass censorship and Internet shutdowns.

IMHO the decisions to de-platform these groups will do nothing to put a dent in their political ideology, and will only serve to throw gasoline on the fire at a contentious period where many millions of people feel like they don't have a voice. And it's likely that peaceful discourse and political thought will be wiped out as collateral damage as a result of the decisions these companies are making.

Trying to engage with the MAGA crowd has been an exercise in futility. Despite no evidence of election fraud on the scale that would overturn the result and every institution in the country asserting the election was free and fair, they refuse to accept it. When they do not act in good faith, incite violence and commit terrorist activity - I think these actions, which were the last resort, is the only sane thing to do.

Free speech is about protecting the tolerant from an abusive and intolerant state, not to allow the intolerant to insult and attack the tolerant. A much smarter thinker called Popper came up with an eponymous paradox about this

What counts as “horrible hateful speech?” The media has been publishing articles recently with outright racist slurs against white people (using phrases like “unbearable whiteness”). Is that hateful speech? (I think so but then again I’m an elder Millennial.) And does the fact that it’s the President saying something warrant giving him more or less latitude?

The right and moral thing to do was to give the duly elected President latitude until it was massive in scope and objectively false. In my mind, that didn’t happen until last month when he continued to claim the election was stolen after the rejection of his lawsuits.

Falsely imprisoned man is angry and lashes out, which proves he wasn't falsely imprisoned in the first place.

The world is backward... my friends that are poor vote republicans and the companies that benefit from the republicans shit on them.

I have been having ongoing arguments on this forum with people who just refuse to accept the reality of what is happening.

I think there is a serious mental health crisis in the US right now, and that the majority of Trump supporters are mentally incapable of acknowledging that they have been lied too, taken advantage of, and as a result are on the wrong side of history.

I have been having meaningful conversations with my family about this, and I feel like I am starting to break through.

Unfortunately I just don't have the emotional bandwidth to coddle the bullshit I see people posting these days in defence of this attempted coup and the resulting murders.

Perhaps a better person than me can be civil with these people, but I just don't give a fuck anymore.

One of the more concerning tactics I've witnessed over the past few years that Trump and other parts of the GOP rhetoric machine were using in service of lying to people.. Convincing people who don't understand very well their rights, democracy, civics, and etc that their RIGHTS were being infringed; by others exercising their rights.

"Stop The Steal" is just another flavor of conflating 1st amendment "freedom of speech" protections with a "RIGHT" to be on some platform or another, or to talk at some venue or another.

The events at the capitol were very bad yes.

But I get the sense people are talking past each other to a degree because there are levels to this.

It goes beyond trying to figure out what the hell happened at the capitol and figuring out how best to prevent it in the future, while maintaining a healthy non-repressive society.

One issue is that these private businesses have become something close to, if not de facto public utilities/infrastructure.

If you ask around you can learn that this "private business overreach" of "big brother" drawing the bounds of "permissible free speech" has actually been going on for some time.

The "private business overreach" part of the story is getting more attention because it has been directed at the most visible person on the planet. Or, was the most visible until Twitter et al, performed "private business overreach" reducing his visibility considerably and simultaneously getting people's attention and raising questions about the nature of power, communication, etc. in the current age.

Another issue is that the "rules" for who and what gets booted and censored from these realms by an always shifting, opaque, and selectively enforced set of rules is to a statistically significant degree clearly bunched in certain areas of the ideological matrix. Are the actors in these areas of the matrix just more prone to breaking the rules or are "the rules" whatever they are today, selectively and over-zealously enforced in order to repress certain ideas and perspectives?

Is there some objective standard against high level US politicians doing things that could be interpreted as inciting, instigating, or glorifying violence?

How about Kamala Harriss posting a bail fund for violent rioters and criminals this past summer, wouldn't that fall squarely over the line of inciting, or instigating, or glorifying violence?

Curiously, crickets around that one...

> just tells me that things really went too far and should have been shut down much sooner.

So is this advocating for enforcement of "pre-crime?" We should keep an eye out for people saying things we don't like then repress their ability to act in the digital age, to prevent them from committing a future crime we have projected onto them?

> The fact that all these institutions just allowed this horrible hateful speech for four years, in the name of free speech etc, despite all the harassment, harm (mental and otherwise) it caused to so many people in America actually emboldened so many to the extent that now that they crossed this invisible line, they can't even really understand the ramifications of what happened. That what gets me.

Hate is an emotion, emotions are subjective. There is no clear objective measure of what is "hateful speech." "Speech" is a noun, an objective thing. Free speech, as in, as little restrictions on speech as are feasible was a great insight by America's founding fathers as to what would contribute to a healthy, dynamic, non-repressive society. Turns out they were right about a lot of things.

Americans today have to be adults and understand that content of speech and someone's actions are different things. The speech of someone like Trump is actually much closer to being an action. But you can't just start repressing speech no matter how "hateful" unfortunately. How about contributing with Love wherever you see hate?

> a few feet away from irreversibly staining American history

Sometimes I think back to another time in the recent past when there was an even more clear and present danger to members of the highest level of the federal govt. I think back in a shocked disbelief of "Holy cow... what if some large fraction of the Congress was murdered in one day?"

Does anybody even remember that?! It was just a couple years ago, multiple shots were fired at Congressmen at a baseball game. It's shocking to think what could have been then.

But it just seems to have dropped off the radar. I wonder why there wasn't a crackdown then on speech about things like Rachel Maddow/NYT/Media Establishment type conspiracies, or even any interest in a public airing of the attacker's motivations.

What did Trump say/do that called for violence? Why could rioters just go to the capitol?

Seeing a dozen news articles the best argument seems to be that the mention of not attending the inauguration was a call for violence. I don't buy it.

The left (including prominent politicians and media figures) are more than willing to provide cover or excuse political violence conducted for their side, and left-wing extremists used FB, Twitter, etc. to coordinate their actions over the past summer.

This is not about removing "hate". This is about removing political opposition.

The WalkAway campaign's FB page was removed, despite no violent content.

The Articles of Unity project has been deplatformed from Twitter (and I believe FB) for a while with no justification and absolutely no hateful content whatsoever.

Yes, there are many high-profile targets that seem easy to justify, but a much larger swath of those affected are completely unjustifiable.

> To be hyperfocused on the free speech or "big brother" aspect of these bans, not the fact that a small group of rioters were just a few feet away from irreversibly staining American history

This. Violence, intimidation and death are the ultimate forms of censorship. Much more so than having to switch your digital payment processor or having to self-host your blog or social media app.

Germany decided after WWII that it was better to mass-censor Naziism than it was to let Nazis freely organize or spread their ideas again. It's not that Germany doesn't like free speech, it's that Naziism and free speech are diametrically opposed and forced to make a choice, they choose free speech.

It seems like a contradiction where censorship promotes free speech, but it all depends on your timeline. In the short term banning Nazis limits free speech, in the long run banning Nazis increases free speech.

When we give violent groups space to grow and organize, we're more anti-free speech than we realize because the capital riots are the inevitable arc (and only the opening act) for very small groups to violently oppress large numbers of peaceful citizens who love democracy.

A few issues:

1) The most radicalized are by Q. Which itself is a disinformation campaign, contributed to by government entities.

2) Bernie sanders brags about occupying government buildings. Would he be held to the same standard? OAC praised BLM protesters marching on the White House a few months ago, with Antifa trying to breach police lines and storm the White House. Should we throw her in jail for sedition. How about Pelosi that asked the army to ignore orders from Trump.

The US might be a democracy. But just because you can vote, does not mean you have any meaningful amount of power. The powerful cabal of corrupt politicians, and their rich backers, they have power. And they have been there for a very long time. They are almost impossible to displace. This breach shook them, because it was common, everyday people that did this. The same people that have had their livelihood destroyed, and have been hurt by all the COVID rules, rioting, trade deals with foreign countries, and so on.

Trump is great for democracy. At every turn he exposes the hypocrisy of the current system. He needles them, and each time they over react. Exposing all their flaws. The amount of backstabbing he gets just from the Republican party, is waking up millions of people.

Thanks to him, we found out how convoluted and non transparent the election process is. How biased the media is. How the Supreme court cowers to political pressure. And now how big tech is working in collusion.

All things that a democratic movement can help to fix.

> ...the fact that a small group of rioters were just a few feet away from irreversibly staining American history with the blood of the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th in the chain of command of the United states of America...

Let me ask for a quick accounting here - what is the evidence for this? My understanding is 100% of the gun deaths were from guns in the hands of law enforcement officers who were perfectly capable of defending themselves when pushed. There are a bunch of instantly iconic photos [0] with basically no weapons in the hands of protestors. They clearly didn't plan on breaching the Capitol or they'd have realised that they were all about to go to jail forever.

This is a not a mob out for literal blood.

[0] https://edition.cnn.com/2021/01/07/us/capitol-mob-deaths/ind...

“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”

— George Orwell, Animal Farm

I understand the moves by Stripe, Twitter, and co. However, I would argue that the long term implications set by this precedent are much worse. When the Snowden story first broke back in 2013, many on HN argued that, hey it's all good, I have nothing to hide, and I trust our President. Three short years later, who took the office? Would you have every imagined that? The same goes for this. Think five minutes into the future if you will.

If the leader of the free world can be banned from all social media and co, who are based in the very same nation, and who are monopolies, then what hope is there for the rest of us?

> If the leader of the free world can be banned from all social media and co, who are based in the very same nation, and who are monopolies, then what hope is there for the rest of us?

1. "leader of the free world" is an incredibly arrogant statement.

2. He can be banned for the same reason that the rest of us can: inciting violence. I'd argue that having equal rules for everyone (or even _stricter_ ones for politicians) is good and healthy. The banning of people inciting violence gives me hope.

It's your opinion that Trump incited violence.

If you ask Trump opposition, they will all say he should go to jail for 1000 years for hundreds of crime that Trump committed.

I'm not close to he situation, but I'd feel much better if a judgement like this actually comes from a trained judge with a proper due process.

Trump called for a March on the Capitol building. This is a very common thing for politicians to do. This does not constitute inciting violence.

> When the Snowden story first broke back in 2013, many on HN argued that, hey it's all good, I have nothing to hide

Wow, that's some impressive revisionist history, unfortunately for you its possible for us to actually look back in time and see exactly what was said.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5849932

Can you prove that the same people who said "so what" to Snowden said "this is fine to these tech actions? My personal experience is that the people who opposed to mass surveillance are fully in support of these actions. At least I do.

It's fairly clear where these companies are drawing a line, and for most people like me, it's a perfectly acceptable line. Being the cause of actual violence and death means you get to be banned. Fairly clear?

The more murky question is people who think all cake shops should serve gay weddings but twitter should also be allowed to ban trump. Tough call and nuance involved there, but I doubt there's much ambiguity separating where one stands on Snowden's revalations and these recent bans

I'm one of those "murky question" people, and here's my take on it.

Discrimination is discrimination, and can and should be prohibited. Free speech was not invented when Twitter and Stripe were created, and thus it cannot be deprived by being banned from these platforms. Fomenting violent revolution is most certainly worth preventing, as is discrimination against people for their immutable traits. Fomenting violence is not an immutable trait.

I see the point people try to make when they equate the two, but I don’t think it’s a good one, because then it equates lgbt discrimination with private company platform bans for fomenting violence, implying that if you have one, you must tolerate the other, but that’s not true. One can ban discrimination while at the same time allowing Twitter or whoever to ban people promoting violence on/with their platforms. The principals are internally logically consistent, even if one disagrees with them.

> When the Snowden story first broke back in 2013, many on HN argued that, hey it's all good, I have nothing to hide, and I trust our President.

Most of the public was pro-Snowden, especially the tech community. Telegram rose like a rocketship as a result of concerns over NSA backdoors.

>When the Snowden story first broke back in 2013, many on HN argued that, hey it's all good, I have nothing to hide, and I trust our President.

Wtf? Nobody said anything of the sort, and if they did they would have been downvoted to the maximum. This is just totally absurd revisionist, we were only five years removed from the W Bush administration, which committed legitimate war crimes and left office with a 22% approval rating.

> When the Snowden story first broke back in 2013, many on HN argued that, hey it's all good, I have nothing to hide, and I trust our President

This is … not even remotely how I remember that period, more of a sense of outrage and companies rushing to encrypt internal connections and deploy PFS.

> If the leader of the free world can be banned from all social media and co, who are based in the very same nation, and who are monopolies, then what hope is there for the rest of us?

This isn’t a great fit: Trump isn’t being banned for being a conservative or talking policies, but for inciting violence which lead to a deadly mob. If all that happens are companies enforcing their terms of service against violence or hate speech evenly, that bothers me a lot less — especially since in this case it’s treating everyone consistently rather than singling him out for special treatment.

Strength through adversity? Maybe this will be the fire needed to improve decentralization and alternative currencies that are more censorship resistant?

> “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”

Actually, the problem is that those with power can get away with this but others can’t.

Think five minutes into the future if you will where there are no consequences if you have enough political power. Some day that might be a socialist or a communist or a white nationalist or a fascist encouraging an armed group to intimidate the legislature. Will we encourage companies to continue to do business with them as well? Or do we specifically grant Republicans and Democrats the privilege to abuse the power of their office?

Imagine Jamal from down the road hammering his neighbors with lies about an election and then organizing a march into the capital that beats a police officer to death with the goal of killing the VP of the US. Jamal had no status, no privilege, no financial resources and no one to pardon him. No one is worried about Jamal or his supporters ever attaining political power and seeking revenge because they have no connections, no wealth and no access to the halls of power. No communities are “healed” by not prosecuting Jamal, so he ends up going to jail for a long time. On the flip side, Stripe has never heard of Jamal so he gets to keep his preferred payment processor after he’s released from prison. Meanwhile Trump who’s been pardoned and is living under Secret Service detail at Mar a Lago is still somehow “not as equal” as Jamal because Trump is only able to make money online through other payment processors but not his preferred Stripe gateway.

Americans didn’t Weimar-Republic into a fascist regime this time, thankfully.

The prevailing idea on HN is however “let’s have no regulation than bad regulation”... Guys, there’s such thing as good regulation.

To be fair, it's far from over. If this is analogous to the beer hall putsch it can be evaluated in a decade or two perhaps.

The very most dangerous thing that could be done right now is to say "glad that's over and nothing happened".

You're pointing out Snowden in 13 and Trump in 16 and implying there's a causal relationship between the two. This is ludicrous, Trump was elected due to numerous factors, it'd be hard to place Snowden in even the top 10. immigration, trade, feckless GOP, crowded primary field, biased dem primary, weak dem candidate, I could make massive list more important than Snowden. All trump's supporters would say about Snowden is that he's a traitor, they'd understand or care little about what he leaked.

Maybe this is a HN bubble, the vast majority of Americans wouldn't be able to tell you what Snowden even specifically leaked...or rather, the journalists leaked on his and our behalf.

Trump is not the leader of the free world any longer. He's clearly on the way out, and he invited violence while the door was closing. Even the weakened GOP must admit he is a wannabe dictator, and his rhetoric led to 5 deaths, nevermind untold thousands to pandemic.

So no, I think there is not much slippery slope implication to deplatforming insane people like Trump, Alex Jones, KKK members, Nazis, terrorists, etc. Why should these people retain the privilege of posting harmful and murderous content on a company's website? Where in the constitution is tweeting an enshrined right?

> You're pointing out Snowden in 13 and Trump in 16 and implying there's a causal relationship between the two.

Your are misinterpreting his comment. He says that you can't 100% trust in long term government/administration. There will always be a bad guy somewhere at some moment.

Not to be reductionist but I don’t see this as a totalitarian issue. This is a free market decision. $Company decides to sever ties with another organization. That choice can be good, bad, reactive, overreactive, misguided, etc but it’s still a market participant choice.

Market remains open for other market participants to make other choices.

On one hand it feels completely appropriate and even deserved. On the other, yes, this is unfortunately a path to a very serious totalitarian issue. Situations like this one underscore the future importance of cryptocurrencies.

Without an uncensorable currency, any political adversary -- especially an incumbent -- can just coerce payment processors into blocking payments to their opponents through threats of imprisonment or violence against a handful of executives.

> Without an uncensorable currency, any political adversary -- especially an incumbent -- can just coerce payment processors into blocking payments to their opponents through threats of imprisonment or violence against a handful of executives.

How is this a good faith argument. You’ve jumped a situation where somewhere is being deplatformed and banned from various services for encouraging violence. To someone will use violence to kick someone off platforms. Coercing payment processors in that manor would be illegal. So, how exactly are we on the path to fascism? This is absolutely wild to me, that a textbook fascist being banned from things is being spun as... fascism.

That has always happened, Visa/Mastercard have been used that way since forever. The Swift system is designed to exercise financial control. Paypal bans anyone for merely looking suspicious to them.

The very idea that cryptocurrency is an "uncensorable currency" is just fundamentally false, yet is a common refrain of crypto supporters who somehow think crypto can exist outside the realm of government control.

Governments can choose to make anything they want illegal, and they have the guns to back up that decision. Sure, it may be easy to make crypto transactions more surreptitiously, but at the end of the day someone is going to want to spend that crypto on something that has real value, and governments can, and do, control what method of payments are acceptable.

Going from bans due to ToS violations all of the way to government coercion of executives through imprisonment is an enormous leap in logic. There's quite a few steps along that path in between.

And if course given that bitcoin has to be sent and received, if we ever arrived at your dystopia, bitcoin would not help: the political rival would simply jail the executive for receiving bitcoin payments instead of USD currency. Bitcoin isn't preventing your dystopia.

Likely the cryptocurrency would still go through an intermediary like Coinbase. And of course Coinbase could terminate their account.

I don't think it is a totalitarian issue. One problem is that the SEC and FTC have sat on their hands in the 21st century. There is no competition anymore. At worst this leads to party supporting companies in each market who will still allow it.

If alternative chat, payment, etc. are prevented from being created, that is not a "free market" decision. This smells like a politically aligned cartel, with key companies enjoying de facto monopoly positions in effect legislating what is and what is not acceptable.

Right now, we haven't heard from ISPs. The entire suite of services that are controlled by the monopoly FANGs can be recreated, including clouds and cloud-fronts.

If that line is crossed as well then we'll have a modern society entirely dependent on information infrastructure that is controlled by a handful of companies with pedigree rooted firmly in the defense and intelligence sectors. You can call that whatever you please, but it will not be pleasant.

[p.s. I vote Green.]

I'm inclined to agree with you. I realize that the term has been abused to the point of meaninglessness, but Fascist economics is defined by corporate monopolies in symbiosis with the state.

It will likely be pleasant for the vast majority of people, who have no objectionable views one way or the other. It might even be better, not having to deal with the constant disruption.

To me this just smells like a bunch of companies finally booting people off for violating ToS. Especially given a reasonable argument that President Trump committed a crime, failing to enforce their ToS could open them to their own legal liability for facilitating activity that went against their ToS and is later found to be criminal. Shareholders would sue for securities fraud at the very least.

You could look at countries as being part of a market. If one country decides to ban your speech, you just move to another one, right? But that's not how it works because switching countries is very difficult. We demand free speech from a government even if we theoretically have the option to move.

If you have a colluding oligopoly in something crucial to do business such as payments or communication, where it's difficult to switch due to network effects, being banned by them is like being banned by government.

Switching online payment providers isn't like moving to a new country, even a little bit.

That's a small market, getting even smaller ...

...which could be viewed as the overall market is deciding not to cater to these views... which is also absolutely legal (and creates a market opportunity for someone else if the group not supported supports it)

First they banned those they deemed to have wrong think from Social Media, crying Build your own Social media, it is a private company...

So they did, but the totalitarians were not satisfied, so then they banned them from app stores users used to connect and find the new service... crying Build your own service it is a private company

So they did, but the totalitarian were not satisfied so they banned them from the network infrastructure used to connect them to the service... crying build your own network infrastructure it is private company

So they did, but the totalitarians were not satisfied so they banned from the payment services used to generate revenue for the service... crying build your own payment service it is private company

So they did, but totalitarians were still not satisfied, still hiding behind the "but its a private company" the totalitarians continue to demand anyone that disagrees with them be banned from all services everywhere all the while screaming that they are not in fact totalitarian, no they are upholding freedom for all...

see in 1984 war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength

As a counterexample: The Pirate Bay have successfully dealt with this sort of thing for many years, and they were subject to much harsher and more sustained censorship. Including legal attacks by various nation states.

Is it really totalitarianism in this case? Or, just some private companies inconveniencing people by choosing not to do business with them?

Exercise of free market principles by platforms booting people/entities that violate their ToS isn't totalitarian.

https://twitter.com/navalny/status/1347970421161922560

does this make you reconsider at all?

I'm not sure why you were downvoted. I hadn't seen that thread from Navalny before, and I certainly think it adds a useful perspective to the debate.

The author implies it’s worse to be censored by a company because with government you in theory can influence it with voting... but in practice you have about as much direct influence as reversing tides in the ocean by splashing against them.

Interesting, but no, it doesn't change my mind. What I agree with is that the ban decision making process should be open and transparent, which this was not.

It's so interesting when people cheer on censorship because, don't worry, they've been convinced that it's good censorship. Still doesn't change what it is though.

I'm sure anybody that's been censored, dehumanized, and removed from society by an evil regime has been comforted by the fact that the people doing it think it's fine to do it, or because the people doing it are doing it legally. Those facts don't make it right ...

I have a feeling that at least half of people here are using the free market argument ironically. Because until last week it was usually republicans who advocated for the free market, no government regulation, and believing that markets sort themselves out magically. And now they are angry when the free market is going in the direction they don't like.

The debate here seems like fuel for antitrust issues. A single company deciding not to do business with someone (over actions, not innate stuff like protected classes) should be fine, but when you let them get to be a backbone service, then issues surface like those discussed by everyone here.

If google, for example decided to stop surfacing trump stuff in results, that could be a real issue. Not because it’s google doing a bad thing, but because google has become so big. Maybe “what happens if this service started banning folks?” is a useful thought exercise for whether a platform has accrued too much market share/power/influence.

Stripe (and every other credit card processors) have long refused to do business with a broad amount and types of businesses. For example, Stripe themselves don't serve most travel sites.

https://stripe.com/blog/why-some-businesses-arent-allowed

It's a super common practice to deny some customers for basically all financial services companies.

If they stopped providing services to all political campaigns that’d be comparable.

What your missing is they are advocating for violence against people. Why is it is an issue to disrupt that?

No one is removing groups that say taxes should be lower. They are distancing them selves from a groups whose core policy is now attempt to violently overthrow the government because they lost an election. If I started discussing on this site how to kill government officials, I'd be banned pretty quick.

To the extent that these separate companies are actually coordinating a takedown of a third party, they could run afoul of anti-racketeering / RICO statutes.

Not that I would hold my breathe waiting for the Department of Justice to press charges.

But private companies do not actually have the right to coordinate takedowns of other companies.

Even if they're talking to each other about it, there's no racketeering or other criminal issue involved when this is the companies enforcing their established ToS. Getting together and saying "hey I think this latest incident really shows we should pay more attention to ToS enforcement" isn't racketeering.

Do you have any actual evidence of coordination, or are you just making stuff up?

Stripe is hardly a “backbone” service. There a dozens of different payment processors out there, many of them much larger than Stripe.

There’s absolutely nothing preventing the Trump campaign from using a different payment processor.

It would be a different matter if Visa and MasterCard had blocked them.

But arguably CloudFlare is such a service and it is still hosting quite a bit of content that actively incites to violence on inauguration day. I won't link to it here though.

Exactly. I'm even sort of glad all of this is happening, because it shows more clear than ever to everyone who can think calmly because he isn't into all this political bullshit (which are few, sadly), how broken all this stuff really currently is. And it's broken on so many levels.

First off, I don't see why, philosophically, the owner of a service shouldn't be allowed to decide, who he wants to do business with. And despite I do remember some stories when the same people who are cheering for Trump to get banned everywhere were defending, quite hypocritically, the opposite point of view, it really wasn't something new and outrageous, even back then, especially when dealing with all these internet-machines. We are long used to the fact, that getting banned on some internet forum is ok and you generally don't have the real option to appeal. The host is the host, and he bans whoever he wants. And while sometimes it may be much much more than a little inconvenience for the person getting banned, people never really cared, because it's rare enough for the consequences of it to be really tragic for people to feel empathetic: society doesn't give a fuck about the problems of an individual unless enough people fear the same might happen to them.

Second, it's never been a secret, where Silicon Valley (HN folks included) is leaning politically. So let's not pretend there are some justifications why they had to do all this shit to Trump for some greater good. The truth is, the entities involved just hate the guy, pretty much everyone in big tech except for Thiel was donating generously to his opponents. So no big surprise here either.

But the first thing that was really special about Trump being bullied by Twitter (quite a while ago) is that this was not some random guy, it was the acting president of a country that hosts Twitter, elected by (more or less) half of the country (on both occasions). So, while (arguably) playing by the rules, Twitter was basically showing that their opinion was more important, than the opinion of the guy half of their the country voted for. And there wasn't some other platform which he could move to, Twitter is Twitter and the rest is, well, the rest. So this was the first point.

Fast forward to now, Trump being banned from everywhere and apps that refuse to ban Trump being banned from Amazon/Apple Store/Google Play themselves, we arrive to the second point: things look a little differently, when there are like 3 major service providers that are supposedly competing with each other, and if they all agree that you're a person non-grata, you are fucked. Even if the half of the country supports you, it's nothing. What really matters that 10 guys on top of these big companies don't like you.

I don't really care about USA elections bullshit, so here is the real point: we don't usually see this, because, first off, there's supposedly not that many reasons for all of FAANG and such to dislike some random person, and second, if it happens, we'll never hear about it anyway. But if the guy half of the country supports (nevermind he is even so called POTUS) struggles to deal with this, everyone else is completely at their mercy.

So either there is decentralization, or there is this.

I think our history books do a disservice when they teach McCarthyism by focusing only on the falsely accused-- many Americans really did support the USSR and some even swore an oath to Stallin. The lesson should be that it was still a mistake to take civil liberties away from these people who passionately supported a horrible cause, not that McCarthyists were just bad prosecutors who arrested the wrong people.

I believe Trump supporters, especially the QAnon weirdos, are wrong to believe the things that they do, but they are less wrong than the people who supported the Soviet Union during its genocidal reign. Unless people are charged and convicted of a crime, their livelihoods should not be taken away by the whims of these powerful companies selectively enforcing their rules. McCarthyism was wrong then and it's wrong now, even though its targets are wrong too.

>The lesson should be that it was still a mistake to take civil liberties away

I agree. No one should take Stripe's civil liberties away from them.

Hollywood is a private business as well. They were within their rights to make a blacklist. And people cheered on big business for protecting them and snitched on their friends to their employers, just like they're doing now

The QAnon folks are no less irrational than any other (pseudo-)religious devotees and should be afforded the same protections under the first amendment.

This is like the millionth time this has been posted on this website in the past few days, but the first amendment applies to the government, not private companies.

Maybe I'm being naive but it seems like a larger problem is being ignored here that I feel I should call attention to.

This is going to piss people off and some of those people are going to be real, nothing-to-lose extremists. Actions like these though seemingly harmless in the short-term are going to radicalize the exact person/type of people that you do not want to radicalize.

Because a lot of high-ranking SV folks (and patrickc) are on here, please, for the sake of stability in the country, do not continue down this path.

This may seem innocuous now and purely a matter of principle, but this is a match to gasoline (in a multitude of ways).

---

Please do not read this through whatever political lens you occupy, but instead through the lens of civility.

On the other hand, avoiding conflict in the short-term will only embolden those who create and thrive on conflict. For these types of people, their next move is usually to escalate. You see this with bullies, abusive relationships, rapists, serial killers, terrorists, etc. They learn what they can get away with, they like the power it gives them, and they try something more.

Therefore, we can't make decisions based on the fear of their response, even if we have a personal aversion to conflict. That's falling into the trap of the abused. We have to make decisions based on defending our principles and standing up for what we believe is right.

No matter what, some people are going to be pissed off at any sufficiently meaningful decision (or indecision). If the people pissed off are violent types, well, then perhaps that's a sign the right decision was made.

I understand that there's a hell of a lot of nuance to this - sometimes you don't poke the sleeping bear. I think Wednesday showed the bear is absolutely not asleep.

I don't agree with this at all and I am tired of seeing "sensible" people here explain how it's important to reach out to fascists and make them feel loved. You're only advocating further normalisation of fascism, and depriving them of the consequences of their actions—consequences that have always been a part of civil society. What's more, that you seem to be more preoccupied with not upsetting these fascists rather than that just a few days ago these very same fascists either attempted a coup or supported a coup does indeed speak of your self-professed naivety (at best). These fascists are a cancer on the body politic and the solution is not to listen to many of the posters here who think that somehow magically the best course of action is simply to do nothing at all, lest we upset the poor lickle fascists.

The problem is those people are already radicalized, and if you give them what they want out of fear, then they’ve already won

I don't agree with the sentiment. You cannot be responsible for people's opinions/reactions for actions you take that you feel are right. Moreover, by placating the very people you would upset otherwise by punitive actions you send a signal that their actions can go unpunished and further entrench the idea that they are right in their actions which is much more dangerous than a temporary outrage.

> This is going to piss people off and some of those people are going to be real, nothing-to-lose extremists

Sometimes certain things need to be dealt with by force, there's no way around it.

It seems that that freedom of speech is not the cause of stability, but stability gives rise to (certain degrees) of freedom of speech. It's a slippery slope, but each country has to have a moral basis on which to decide where to draw the line.

It really won't. It'll be cited as a the grievance that drove them over the line in manifestos or court testimony, but generally people are radicalized by themselves or peers and then cast around for an exterior excuse afterwards. The grievances vary with circumstances, the target or out-group disliked by the extremist person stays the same.

You are correct, I have been saying this for months/years. The reason this is escalating is for the same reason this always does: unwillingness to believe war is a possibility, then unwillingness to forgive until the suffering has gone on so long it is intolerable.

I am concerned about all the normal employees of these companies, that are taking these political actions. The higher up people can afford round the clock security. The normal SDE at these companies did not sign up for political activist company. What do they do now?

Appeasement has never, ever worked throughout history.

The implied threat of radicalization should be dead to you, and those who try to make this argument. They are already radicalized.

The idea is if you remove enough of their ability to communicate with the general population, their influence will be significantly reduced. It would remove the feedback loop that's feeding the fire.

It also sends a message that their behavior is unacceptable. That has a very strong influence on culture as a whole. Messages like this are how a lot of civil rights movements have worked.

The larger problem is that the United States Congress was, just four days ago, invaded by a violent mob and forced into hiding for hours. People are going to be a lot more radicalized if they think they can get away with that! It would be like refusing to cut business ties with a mafia don because you're afraid of radicalizing his soldiers - maybe there's some short-term benefit, but in the long term all you accomplish that way is legitimizing the violence.

I agree with this, instinctually. However, I think the political calculus here is that it's better to really piss off a "small" amount of people than allow a potentially larger group to get radicalized.

Vice did an article on this recently, when Telegram tried to kick off ISIS: https://www.vice.com/en/article/vb55bd/telegram-deplatformin...

It's interesting to consider whether the (soon to be former) president of the US deserves similar treatment to a terrorist organization responsible for tens of thousands of civilian deaths.

This confirms how disingenuous/delusional "free market", "free association" and "free assembly" arguments are in this case. Decisions by entities of this size simply cannot be interpreted under a "free association" lens, except to the same extent that Lockheed-Martin not selling arms to Iran, or, more pertinently, Baidu not serving up photos of the Tiananmen Square protests, can be interpreted under the same lens. You cannot conclude that an act of censorship is not a state or government wielding its power merely because it is done by a private company,

Nominally, Tencent is a privately owned company freely choosing who they provide a platform to [2]. But in reality, they have absolutely no choice but to ban Winnie the Pooh, unless they want a state apparatus to make their lives incredibly difficult from then on.

The same in the US: these are not mom-and-pop stores with immediate agents and agendas exercising their free association rights in accordance with their personal beliefs. These are large tech companies, deeply and inseparably intertwined with public authority and the political parties, lobbying and making political contributions on one side, seeking political approval and avoiding threats of regulatory retaliation on the other. They know full well that if they ban the wrong speech and refuse to ban the "right" speech, they face being regulated out of business. Indeed, seeing this threat, we see them scramble to align with an incoming administration.

You don't have to be an all-in free speech absolutist to see what's wrong with this: we're not talking about people with fringe views having to move to fringe platforms, we're talking about the campaign of the largest (soon-to-be-)opposition party being banned from major platforms en masse, while people with significant credibility regarding authoritarianism [1], who also happen to be on bad terms with said opposition party [2] denounce these acts as "unacceptable acts of censorship".

[1] https://twitter.com/navalny/status/1347969772177264644 [2] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-09-05/donald-trump-us-has-n...

This is insane. I’m anti crypto since inception but there needs to be checks and balances. No judicial precedent or order just monopolies. If you’re pro AWS and social media banning I disagree but can understand to an extent. This is just lunacy

this is a pretty good time for a lot of the anti crypto crowd to figure out the necessity of permissionless money. I hope to never hear the statement "crypto has no real usecase" ever again.

What's lunacy is inciting your supporters to be violent and try to overthrow democracy. Replace insurrection with child porn and see if your argument still stands.

And yet Apple and Google have never taken any action against twitter despite similar content over the past four years threatening or organizing violence on twitter - content which is still there to this day.

America has fallen into an Orwellian society. Would have never thought that possible, but to see the number of people supportive of such a society is mind boggling.

Twitter actually makes a good faith effort to try. The same cannot be said of the president or areas where his followers tend to congregate.

can you link to any content on Twitter where people are organizing violence?

Isn't this overreach?

Financial organisation making conditions on which political party you can support.

This isn't new, Visa and Mastercard will block payments when it's politically expedient (see: pornhub, Kyle Rittenhouse legal funds).

It's not about which political party they support. Literally no one is being banned from stripe just for voting republican.

This takes it a step closer, and certainly invokes that fear.

Financial organization choosing not to facilitate transactions that fund literal terrorism.

Yes, it's very much overreach.

They have been doing it on other less prominent people and businesses, and haven't suffered any major consequences.

But, this is major escalation in political activism, and likely will not end up the way things have worked out in the past.

Trump wasn't banned for being a republican...

Your political party isn’t a protected class. If you think it should be then call your congress critter and get them to change the law.

Except in California (where Stripe is HQ'd).

https://californiaemploymentlaw.foxrothschild.com/2018/10/ar....

The trump campaign fundraises through a generic platform for all republicans, is the entire Republican party cutoff from Stripe now?

More generally Stripe knows which users have contributed to the campaign, bought merch etc. Even beyond the card used as they also fingerprint the browser[1]. Will those users be blocked by Stripe Radar across all sites now? After all they "contributed to domestic terrorism"

Probably not, but what a great marketing on ramp for 75M people to crypto!

[1] https://mtlynch.io/stripe-recording-its-customers/

I m sorry but all this concerted action feels (from afar) a lot like "if people don't vote the way we want, we re just gonna have to force them". It's not about overreach, but companies are not political entities, and reversing this relationship is a self-defeating travesty

And if they are doing it for cheap popularity points -- well trump may be gone in a week, but his voters won't leave. this just reinforces mistrust in the state itself

Stop downplaying a literally terrorist attack on the nation's Capitol.

It's a business decision. What if a boycott starts because other customers don't like Stripe sticking with Parler? They should just eat the losses? It's a business decision and companies are free to make them.

The irony of this is that you’re so close to being right, but you’re focusing on the wrong group.

On Wednesday an armed mob literally rushed the Capitol because people didn’t vote the way they wanted them to, with the intent to just force them. It might end up being a “self-defeating travesty”, but only time will tell.

But you seem more worried about a virtual “mob”, which frankly seems insanely out of touch at the moment. And more than a little bit insulting, given that there are actual mobs running around trying to kill members of congress.

people did vote they way they wanted

Mistrust is already there. It is too late. Force is the only way forward. Even they agree with this notion, otherwise they wouldn't storm the capitol. Everyone is just playing according to the rules.

What’s amazing is this is, despite most commenters agreeing here, incredible evidence for the “they’re all controlled by the same people” crowd.

This level of coordinated action shouldn’t be possible in a healthy, diverse, competitive environment.

Bad idea IMO, the Internet doesn't forget. Why would anyone choose Stripe over another payment processor now when Stripe comes with the additional risk of being banned at a whim for whatever political/ideological/opportunistic virtue-signalling reason? It's not like they have a monopoly like Apple and Google with their respective App Stores. The same goes for AWS, it's just irresponsible to use it now.

> being banned at a whim

The President of the United States just incited insurrection because he lost the election.

This is not a case of somebody being "banned at a whim".

> incited insurrection

AFAICT this is a common opinion shared by half the population or so, but it's not an undisputed fact or court ruling. What's protecting you or me from similarly popular accusations that might be false in our case? Should we only use Stripe and AWS if we are certain we'll never do, say, or be associated with something that might upset half the population of the USA or a few people in power? Wikileaks upset a lot of people and got banned by VISA and others, for example. Without any wrongdoing in my opinion.

For my business sense, being dependant on AWS, Stripe, Shopify or other politically motivated organizations is a risky situation I'd rather avoid. YMMV.

Welcome to the shiny new age of totalitarian tolerance.

I wonder if during world war 2 people opposed fighting nazis like this...

I really don't think this is it (Yet), but (although the Chinese may take priority sadly) the Orwell's of the future will probably be writing about these companies.

As a complete outsider to US politics I'm still struggling to understand why so many people are upset at "Big Tech" about this.

I think what all the de-platforming efforts show very clearly is that people inside these companies, taking their cues from what is most likely a majority of their employees and probably most importantly...customer base, don't want to be associated with certain types of behavior.

Maybe it's driven by greed, maybe ethics...doesn't really matter. They've done the analysis and they've all decided that it's ultimately bad for the company long term.

From all the complaints, one would think that these CEO's just woke up one day decreed these bans due to their own personal feelings.

To the HN users arguing in bad faith that Parler was just another Twitter or Facebook, it wasn't. The top posts of the site were overwhelmingly calls for violence, racism, and the spread of conspiracy theories. Parler volunteer moderators curated all dissenting voices on the platform to produce the exact content they wanted (accounts are shadowbanned by default until they are 'approved' for crying out loud).

This is the paradox of tolerance reaching its tipping point. Any sufficiently tolerant society can only be so tolerant until a bad actor becomes so detrimental to the continued function of that society, that they must choose between allowing some intolerance toward the destructive actor or risk losing everything by allowing the bad actor to continue their work.

This is not the patriot act. This isn't Prism. This is a group of people grooming others to shout fire in a crowded assembly hall. Good riddance.

Is Parler a Russian OP? Is this conspiracy theory or facts? https://twitter.com/davetroy/status/1327270213256179712

I haven't seen any "proper" news channels touching founding/funding subject.

I feel like decentralized solution like Bitcoin would solve the problems of responsibility, liability and trust. There needs to be economic incentives and costs throughout the network. You as a processing node can support who ever you want and you can collect fees from them for processing transactions. For example if majority of nodes do not want to process certain transactions from certain individuals or organizations renaming nodes can charge high fees and earn huge profits meanwhile demotivating the sender/s of this transactions.

Satoshi mentioned feeding off of spammers[1] ; basically you farm money from malicious and toxic emails(content) or malicious and toxic transactions. This way you disincentive them to continue with their malicious operations.

[1] https://marc.info/?l=cryptography&m=123290127832572&w=2

Not everything can and should be solved by half-baked blockchain technologies.

Typo:

remaining nodes*

He'll have to start taking cryptocurrency.

He said previously of cryptocurrency:

"I am not a fan of Bitcoin and other Cryptocurrencies, which are not money, and whose value is highly volatile and based on thin air. Unregulated Crypto Assets can facilitate unlawful behavior, including drug trade and other illegal activity."

Just make your own platform bro

Just create your own online shop bro

Just host your own platform bro

Just host your own videos bro

Just make your own DDoS protection bro

Just make your own ISP bro

Just create your own law firm bro

Just create our own payment processing bro

The trump campaign raised $200 million from soliciting donations to challenge the elections.

Maybe they could have used some of that money to do just that?

There's plenty of money to at least try.

Your point is well taken.

However, forcing people or organizations (which are groups of people) to host or support speech/activities they do not wish to support restricts the rights of those people/organizations.

If you can force them to give up their rights, others can force you to give up your rights.

I can't support that at all.

What's more, the idea that there's some sort of conspiracy/cabal that spans every corporation, industry and profession to murder free speech is a pretty far-fetched one.

There's an old saw that says, "if everyone around you appears to be an asshole, perhaps it's you and not everyone else."

Not obligatory but apropos:

https://xkcd.com/1357

If you’re a principled free market conservative, then all of those are valid responses.

Welcome to the free market at work! Sometimes market forces work against you but you don’t get to complain about it.

Just build your own payment processor.

I'm curious if other countries around the world are going to see how dependent they are on these so called "platforms" and is it going to trigger a change.

If Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Apple, Google, Stripe, etc. decide to ban you, you are done, vanished into thin air. You lose your infrastructure, social network, media channel, de-listed from Search, and oh yeah right, your financial end up being blocked.

While Uganda is not the best example, they are the first country which realised how quickly you can get deleted, so they just decided to completely block all the players. And again, the average joe gets hurt...

Reminds me of when payment processors dropped Wikileaks. That was never reversed, so I don’t think this will be either.

Stripe doesn't owe anyone the right to use their services. Just as an airline can bar anyone for most any reason (unless that reason is membership in a protected class[0]), Stripe can do the same.

I wonder, would these bans would have happened if the Republicans maintained control of the senate?

Counterfactuals are hard, and I'm spitballing here, I think it's useful to consider a scenario where that would be true: for Republicans to have maintained control of the Senate would likely correspond to more public support for Republicans in general, which means it's less likely there would have been run-offs in Georgia; the outcome of the November 2020 elections would likely have been settled much sooner, and less motivation for the unrest that culminated on January 6. So, as to the narrow "would these bans would have happened" now? Probably not.

All of this is conjecture, thought experiment off the top of my head that I will not do much to defend. And, of course, none of that is what actually happened.

That's pretty awful.

If I had a dime for every time I read some pearl clutching comment about the big brother slippery slope on HN, I could have retired by now.

In all these years, the only actual existential danger to society to materialize are precisely the entities that are now being deplatformed.

Excuse me if I don't take all this hand wringing on behalf of unstable insurrectionists seriously.

When half the country is so resentful of the other half that it starts to act out, is escalating that situation the best option?

Or perhaps you let them vent for a bit (mostly harmlessly, but not entirely) and then try to engage with them and bring them back to reality?

Upvoted for teaching me a new phrase.

I am curious for the people against such action by Stripe, what conditions do you think are appropriate before cutting off this kind of service to a customer?

I imagine there must be some conditions that would make one say "we are enabling this individual's actions" to some definiton of "actions" that you disagree with.

Honestly? Breaking the law.

Companies providing a service should not care what it is used for. If society has a problem with what people are using services for, it should pass laws, and the companies should comply with the requirements of the law.

I don't know why we are allowing massive companies with unchecked power to make decisions about what is acceptable behaviour on social networks. Since when did they make the laws?

We have a process for this, and it is for democratically elected representatives accountable to their voters to write laws.

Just because you agree with the decisions made by these companies today doesn't mean this is the right process. They're unelected and unaccountable. It's an insult to democracy that we're allowing them to control people's behaviour, even if you agree with them.

It does not feel like any of these purges are voluntary. Maybe fb which is coincidentally under most legal pressure atm

I'm in favor of payment processors doing the right thing but I also want people to have ways to move money where they want. which seems like something the internet has failed to evolve, without these very very high priced middlemen. I wish banks would do something useful. they don't. seems like they won't. this guy deserves nothing but choking society by these narrow narrow deciders, these enablers of basic functions opting out... grossly imbalanced & disgusting that this is such a death knell, that events like this are catastrophic. coproations should not have such a chokehold on basic society.

Looking at history, censorship has a far worse track record in terms of destroying democracy, than public assembly (even inside civic buildings) does. What makes people think that this time will be different?

All of these silicon valley companies need to realize they live in a bubble. You can't continue doing this and expect it to be recieved well.

Yes the extreme right is ridiculous. But the extreme left is too.

Spend some time outside silicon valley and other liberal hubs. Understand the perspective of others.

I am not in favor of violence. I am not in favor of Trump's behavior. However Trumps stance on policy typically aligns more closely with what I believe than Biden. Behavior like this alienates me.

Again, I do not love Trump. Far from it. But these moves come across not as anti-extreme-right, but anti-conservative.

> But these moves come across not as anti-extreme-right, but anti-conservative.

No, they're anti-"storm the nation's seat of government with an angry mob intent on killing members of Congress and / or the Vice President, as a last ditch effort to overturn a democratic election"

I’m sure they took it into account that certain people would feel “alienated” by this, but weighed it against what has happened over the last 4 years and what happened last week in the Capitol and decided “yep, worth it”.

Personally, I don’t understand how you can acknowledge that you ‘far from love Trump’ (paraphrase) but then consider a banning of his campaign (which is separate from the R party and from conservatism) as against you, a conservative.

I wonder if this will spearhead the adoption of cryptocurrencies which we so desperately need?

Who said free speech must extend to every private entity? Can I walk into anyone's home, business, property, or vicinity and say whatever I want with zero consequence? Why should websites have to allow anything to be written on their own website?

This is the start of antitrust against big tech. They’ve made enemies on both sides

This is a really bad idea. I'm more sympathetic to Twitter. Even under the First Amendment there's no right to say things that aren't true. Which is more the issue than incitement. But this goes way too far:

Companies with business before the US and foreign governments should not be making these decisions. The potential for corruption is absolutely huge. Do we really want Tik Tok deciding what the US President can and can't say.

This is going to further erode trust in US institutions. To believe Trump isn't lying about the election you have to think there's a massive conspiracy to keep him out of power. Well...

Banning people from sharing beliefs doesn't make them less popular. Banning racist speech has NOT worked in Europe.

This is disproportionate to what Trump actually did. This is not to downplay the seriousness of a riot inside the Capitol Building. The timing and nature of the act are repugnant and the people who did it deserve to spend some quality time in federal prison. Trump's false rhetoric about the election being stolen undoubtedly (and foreseeably) motivated these people. But I don't think what he said can be fairly read as advocating what happened. There was no threat whatsoever of the government being overthrown. Trump and people like him will ultimately find a way around these actions. And once they do they will cease to be effective. Individual states can probably step in and ban this sort of thing. And I fully expect most Red States to have done so by the end of the year. These tools should be preserved for a true emergency. Which this isn't.

The right solution to the issue of disinformation is changing libel laws. NYT vs Sullivan was probably a mistake. And several states have criminal libel laws that could have plausibly been applied here.

Silicon Appalachia is gonna be hilarious.

This is why we need cryptocurrency.

There's clearly a line in the sand to be made somewhere here e.g. funding child pornography or terrorism. The easy answer for Stripe is "we ban any account that promotes illegal activity". In that sense, I can see the rationale of banning a political campaign that has clearly fomented an attempt at circumvent a legal civil process.

I just want to say that I really like the format of that article: short and to the point.

I love Axios. It also looks like they might even try to be more than a news outlet, but more of a tech company. I signed up to access this tool, would love to try it out for our clients.

https://www.axios.com/hq

All of this is bullish for cryptocurrencies, that's all I'm gonna add here.

Trump could have gotten away with anything. Free speech has to have limits. Free speech, but not at the cost of lives. Trump crossed a bar, his constant spread of hatred and dividing the country led to people dying. It led to his supporters walking into the capitol with IED bombs. If they found Mike Pence or Nancy pelosi, they were ready to spill blood. People died. It has been discussed in Parler, thedonald.win, in r/TheDonald subreddit.

This is the line. If they simply protested outside, it would have been fine.

Although I am not okay with total ban forever.

The courts should be the ones deciding on such matters. We ought to have a civil debate about this. Both sides feel they are right.

I also agree that Big Tech is way too powerful and Republicans strongly feel they are suppressed. That ain’t right. Big Tech needs to be held in check. They don’t enforce their policies uniformly, neither is there a due process where both sides of the argument are heard and recorded before a judgement is made. Someone wakes up and clicks a button “Ban” without much recourse for their actions.

That’s the problem. We need more objectivity and accountability in the system.

Maybe I'm looking at things differently.

Doesn't this push Trump to accept bitcoin. Wouldn't bitcoin get a big boost making him richer as the donations increased?

By doing this now highlight how much Stripe profitted when the going was good. But it also signals when the going isn't good they will not stick with you.

I hope Stripe gave them a week to find a new payment processor.

Conservatives argued it was totalitarian overreach to force a cake baker to make a gay cake, maybe rightly so even if totalitarian was hyperbolic. Now we’re going to force companies to allow people to coordinate or encourage the overthrow of the entire government and that’s not totalitarian?

Freedom of speech, you cry.

Well, OK, this is freedom of speech…for Stripe. They don’t like what Trump has done. They are a private company. It’s their ball. They can take it home whenever they want to.

Speech has consequences, and if you foment a hostile takeover of Congress, you pay your price.

This argument went out the window when Amazon started infrastructure bans. "Build your own..." What? Internet? Country?

So long free speech and thanks for all the fish.

"Nobody gets fired for banning Trump."

People behind all the platforms that are now banning Trump and GOP politicians presumably were aware of what was happening in the last two years. I wonder if recent events were truly the last straw for them, or did they suddenly gain the will to act after election results and are doing the right thing because it’s convenient now.

Tech companies are acting exactly like Republicans who were aligned with Trump. Everybody using this chance to say how much against Trump they are... in his last 10 days.

Honestly it is ugly how stupid and easily swayed they think the public are.

The time to ban and disconnect from Trump was about 3 years ago.

Ironic, in light of the Trump admins recent ban on Alipay and other chinese payment apps.[1]

[1]: https://www.ft.com/content/0cd2285d-5e39-4d54-81e7-f4c657364...

Know your customer.

What took so long?

"Stripe is the Christian bakery and Trump is the gay wedding."

Imagine what would happen if Trump comes back and says:

"Our store is only accepting Bitcoin, Ethereum and Monero as payment methods"

Could spearhead the shift to decentralized cryptocurrencies.

The people cheering this on will not be protected when the mob comes for you.

We live in a digital age. If having the wrong opinion means you can get your bank accounts and all Internet presence removed from you, it's not any different than living under a fascist government.

Please make your points more substantively than this. Your comment is the fulcrum tipping this thread into flamewar, and that's because the ratio of grandiosity-plus-inflammation to information in it is super high (high is bad).

(I'd make the same reply if you were arguing this way for the opposite position, in case anyone is still worried about that.)

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I don’t know if you were paying attention last week, but the mob literally came for the members of Congress.

There are wrong opinions, and then there is “six million Jews were not enough” and “hang the Vice President”, and a violent mob attacking the Capitol. No one is under any obligation to tolerate such actions in a civil society.

If I advocate for your murder, am I just expressing an opinion that should be consequence free if someone kills you? Does that change if enough people agree with me that you should be killed?

Spare us your outrage. A literal mob just overran the Capitol. Attempting to talk about “the mob” in opposition to the actual mobs that are continuing to take over Capitol buildings is frankly so tone deaf it’s almost insulting to our intelligence.

The people cheering this on will not be protected when the mob comes for you.

The facile sophistry of comments like yours is becoming obnoxious. An actual fascist mob already came for us last week and we were not protected, get it?

There can be interesting intellectual arguments about whether this was the right move but breathlessly calling ToS enforcement by private companies a “mob” while ignoring an actual mob with lead pipes, guns, and bombs ain’t it.

Get back to me when they do it to someone who did not just tell a crowd of terrorists to go over to the Capitol and "save" the country from its own democratic process.

There's a big difference in wrong opinion and inciting violence. This isn't the government doing this. This is private companies taking action against the spread hate and lies. These are companies I want to do business with.

gab got de-platformed and the mob didn't come for anybody else...the world moved on. not everything is a slippery slope. tons of people criticizing it on twitter/fb and they aren't being censored.

There is a difference between having unpopular opinions and advocating for violently overthrowing our government.

You should probably look up what the hallmarks of fascism are sometime. It might surprise you.

The funny thing about the mob is that it does not remember whether you cheered it on or not.

And the funny thing when there are two mobs fighting each other is that neither will exercise restraint if the other backs down.

So the smart thing to do is to be either so powerful the mob can't touch you or to be so invisible the mobs can't see you.

There is always the Kolmogorov option.

> wrong opinion

The wrong opinion being the fascist attempted coup of a democratic government

please quit equating terrorism with “differing opinion”

trump caused his followers to believe the election was a lie, and when they came to protest he egged them on to the capital building where they beat a police officer to death with an american flag while singing the anthem.

they beat him to death with an american flag and trump called them patriots after.

beat him to death sir, these patriots, our president said. wearing nazi tshirts, sir.

differing opinions? maybe you can find a better way to communicate your idea here

There's a gradation of things, it's not black or white. The gray zone in the middle is where conditions for society to prosper are.

I see where you are coming from, but I do not agree that they are being punished just for “having the wrong opinion”.

The Trump campaign just attempted a coup. As in they attempted to seize control of the government by stopping the lawful transition of power. That it failed does not make it any less serious. Should we let them continue to try until the are successful? Let’s not repeat the mistakes of 1920s Germany.[0]

I do not think it is hyperbole to say that Trump and his ilk are fascists, not unlike the Nazis.[1] They are the mob that is coming for you.[2] Do not make the mistake of failing to believe these people when they tell you who they are and what they are about.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_Hall_Putsch [1] https://images.app.goo.gl/BxMXjGz7Zjsa1G6Q8 [2] https://twitter.com/59dallas/status/1346963199778828290?s=21

What mob? The one what wants to hang Mike Pence? I'm not a Trump supporter but as a Christian I admire Mike Pence as a person, even before he supported Trump.

Wrong opinions? They ban nazi lovers

Banks accounts? All internet presence? Neither of those things is happening. They still have websites, not to mention a press secretary with the world’s press at their feet.

Minimizing it to just wrong opinions? NAMBLA, look it up, is still around so stating this is about wrong opinions is ignorant.

I’m fairly certain that attempting to overthrow the government to get your desired election result is fascism. Saying we will have a trial by combat just before telling protestors to head to the Capitol sounds a lot like a call for violence.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/giuliani-rally-speech/

You are free to create your own far-right payment bank and payment system. The fact that sites like 4chan and Stormfront continue to exist is a sign that no one's speech has been stifled, only inconvenienced.

“First they came for the violent insurrectionists, and I did not speak out”

Also, I'm not advocating for any violence, but keep in mind that the US was certainly not created peacefully either: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Revolutionary_War

>If having the wrong opinion means you can get your bank accounts and all Internet presence removed from you, it's not any different than living under a fascist government.

Calling for the overthrow of the government through violent insurrection isn't an opinion.

Should I be worried? Probably not since I am not advocating for the violent overthrow of democracy in America.

> The people cheering this on will not be protected when the mob comes for you.

> We live in a digital age. If having the wrong opinion means you can get your bank accounts and all Internet presence removed from you, it's not any different than living under a fascist government.

Just to rebaseline, in this case a mob infiltrated the dais in the Capitol, and this mob's opinions included speech not just disagreeable to public corporations but unprotected by the United States government. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exce...

If you can't ban a fascist for instigating violence and a coup attempt then your ToS are worthless and all moderation on every website must be made illegal.

Correct. While silencing him may be satisfying, this road will lead us down a dark path. It is better to suffer a little evil than to loose everything good.

There was a time when the tech community fought ferociously against corporations and government attempts to censor and silence ideas. In its early years, Slashdot was ardently libertarian, as were most of the engineers I worked with. Can you imagine 1997 Slashdot’s reaction to something like Apple removing Parler from the App Store? There would be protests, DDoSes, editorials from thought leaders, and more.

I feel very out of place with many of the younger folks working in tech today. The majority of them seem to support (or even demand) de-platforming of people and ideas that they disagree with.

This is not a good trend. As you said, the mob will eventually come for you, too.

> it's not any different than living under a fascist government

We should be celebrating Stripe's ability to do this. Do you think a Chinese company could "deplatform" Winnie The Pooh?

It's fantastic that we can still disassociate ourselves and our businesses from someone like Trump!

I have seen this exact phrase like 500 times in the past week. Do you guys all read the same books or something?

It's such a huge exaggeration to say that stripe's decision was motivated by a 'mob'... Wait, it was motivated by a mob, the mob of right wingers. And they DID come for me. That's why we ban them from our websites.

It's just pure fear mongering and outrage news to say that liberals are mobbing together to force companies (as if its not ultimately the choice of the company) to ban people, and that somehow this will lead to them turning on each other... and then i'll be sorry i banned Trump? I don't get it.

Other people have pointed out that Trump and much of the GOP just launched a coup, so I'll leave that aside.

Of course it's different from living under a fascist government. A totalitarian government would send you to a prison camp or kill you for saying the wrong thing. The Stasi would systematically and invisibly ruin all your relationships and your career. People who are banned from Twitter can go to another website or start their own. If they're banned from Stripe, they can use Visa or pay in cash. If they are banned from social media, they can hop on any of the numerous right-wing TV stations or write for any of the numerous right-wing newspapers.

Even if this were the government, it would be an exaggeration to say that these actions are totalitarian. There are countries today where you could get locked up for having the wrong opinion that are miles from being fascist. Germany springs to mind, since many people have been arrested for Holocaust denial. Many European countries tick along just fine despite the fact that they would instantly throw the likes of the Westboro Baptist Church in prison.

The American dedication to freedom of speech is admirable. However, it is also an aberration. Since the American approach to freedom of speech is not the norm, we should treat it as rare and precious but also recognize that things would be mostly fine with some restrictions. Cool it with the hyperbole.

This sounds like a slippery slope argument[1], which can be genuine but also controversial when generalized.

Can we talk about individual instance, like those specific to the current situation with Trump or other situations, like "Operation Choke Point," separately or should something like this be only considered with generic rules that do not consider the nuisance and details of any specific circumstance?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope

Does Russia or China host any payment processors? That would be my advice to Republicans or anyone who wishes to dissent against the liberal Western order.

It's going to be impossible to rely on American corporations to serve you if your opinion goes against ruling consensus.

It is getting ridiculous... the companies are getting really scared, I think.

So is google going to start censoring my email now? I have friends in islamic and other authoritarian regimes that deal with this sort of thing. So ironic in the effort to fight fascism big tech becomes fascist. Doubleplusgood doublespeak!

I feel like a lot of tech companies are walking into a trap. They are doing this to win favors from Harris-Biden administration but regulations are going to happen regardless.

In fact, the USGOV can now point to these very actions as evidence to push for tech regulation. It's very similar to how during Vietnam War, many on the South Vietnam side switched sides to fight their own.

When the smoke cleared, the first people to go were those who switched sides to help the communists come into power. Reason: once a traitor, always a traitor.

This is more of a political statement from Stripe than a business decision.

They made their choice, we'll see the consequences of their actions now.

It's one thing to ban a normal person or business. But to ban Trump, the current sitting president, leader of GOP and the person that represent almost half the country, is tall order.

There's good reason why business should avoid politics, like Coinbase has done so far. It's a slippery slope that doesn't end well for the business.

All I ask is consistency of deplatforming by big tech. If Trump gets deplatformed for inciting violence, then BLM should get deplatformed for all the cops assassinated by BLM activists.

This is terrifying. They'll be coming for Trump supporters next. Gmail dropping anyone who receives Trump spam? Anything is possible now.

somebody should release a WWII/Cultural Revolution style poster "What did YOU do today to deplatform Trump?"

Something like this "What did you do today for the victory?" https://i.pinimg.com/originals/c2/33/2f/c2332f9706f7b768243f... or this "What did you do for the airforce?" or this http://www.sovmusic.ru/jpg/posters/ussr0550.jpg

We’re now into “would you provide credit processing for a small terrorist organization” territory with the Trump campaign.

If they were a foreign non-state actor, it probably would be criminal offense to provide aid or transmit money for them. (For fairly obvious 1st amendment reasons it’s not possible to do that with fellow Americans, which is why the statutes specify foreign terrorist groups).

I’m not terribly surprised that everyone is dumping them.

People here seem very certain that there won't be any negative externalities from tech companies deplatforming Trump and Parler. Let me raise several concerns.

If you are a politician, are you comfortable with a few tech CEOs holding the power to destroy your campaign? Especially when the CEOs live in the same region and contribute to similar causes? Wouldn't you seek to rein in the power of companies that have the power to destroy you? Or seek to use this power against your political enemies?

"Don't attempt a coup," you say. Sure. But the stated reason by the companies is generally that Trump campaign encouraged and promoted violence - are you sure that this rational will be narrowly applied going forward? Especially when there's an effort by some to redefine hurtful language as violence?

If having active/robust moderation is a hard requirement to exist as a viable app, wouldn't this prohibit new social media companies from going viral? FB/Twitter spends millions and employs an army of contractors to moderate their platforms. Can a new startup that's growing exponentially build moderation before they're shut down by Apple/Google/AWS?

On a related note, does it concern you that the last two social media apps that seriously challenged FB/IG/Twitter are Tik Tok and Parler, and the American government forced a sale of the former and private companies collectively decided to boot the latter?

Hey, I'm just being paranoid. I'm sure these monopolistic companies will use their power perfectly going forward and never make any mistakes. I'm also sure that government will respect their reasonable use of power and leave them alone.

This isn't sitting well with me at all. Of course it had to be done, but I also think it's a scary precedent.

    First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—
         Because I was not a socialist.

    Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
         Because I was not a trade unionist.

    Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
         Because I was not a Jew.

    Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

I realize that the banned groups and people were really into extremism (to say it lightly), but there's also the fact that the Pandora's box has been opened, where huge private companies can remove figures and communities of an entire political spectrum - leaving them voiceless. And given the way political democracy swings, I am quite afraid of the time this starts happening to us.

Also, just to clarify: I'm thinking this from the POV of the non-violent conservatives who are seeing this as an attack on their politics, and who can then use this as a justification to block BLM/"antifa" protests for "peace" if they come back in power.

The "they" in the poem is the people who stormed the Capitol building, not Stripe. The "me" is, say, Marco Rubio or Mitch McConnel: a conservative, willing to hitch themselves to an authoritarian for a while, but who ultimately finds the authoritarian policies too distasteful (and that the leaders policies are dangerous, even to someone who was initially a moderate ally or supporter of the leader).

And I mean this quite seriously. Neimoller, the author of the poem was at least somewhat anti-Semitic and a Nazi and a supporter of Hitler until the mid 1930s.

welp, guess stripe is actually evil. that sucks because i considered working for them in the future (had an offer from them before), but guess not anymore.

plus their equity vesting structure is absolute trash and doesn't allow employees to get any gains from the stock rising before vest. stay away.

The past several years have made me aware of the vulnerability of overreliance on consolidated powers. Silicon Valley has too much influence on the world. Most of the world’s tech resides within it. The ideology of the region is vastly different than large swaths of the country. The nuance goes far beyond simply Democrats versus Republicans. California, solidly a blue state that overwhelmingly voted for Biden, voted very differently internally when it came to November’s ballots. Just a few counties away, we came to find that the rest of the state believes in fundamentally different values than the Bay Area. For example, the majority of residents within the Bay Area were in favor of Prop 16 while the rest of Californians were not. What this means is that even Democrats themselves cannot agree amongst each other on fundamental values. This should be concerning even to Democrats because one faction of their party has overt influence and control on the flow of the world’s information. This week’s events made it evidently clear that one’s presence on the web is dependent on the wills of those from a very small concentrated region. A region in which people outside struggle to even make their why into it, physically, because of prohibitive cost of living and limited housing. Are we going to live in a future in which all of those who do not bow to the Bay Area’s ideology will have the digital rug pulled under them? Hopefully not, but the point isn’t wether they will or not, but rather can they do it. We shouldn’t make ourselves so vulnerable.

No quarter.

Free speech limited by inciting violence, OK, but should be applied evenly. Anrifa, BLM, weren't deplatformed, right?

The politics of the new right are for some reason considered an existential threat by big tech, and the global security and intelligence faction.

We can't have a situation where Trump can actually deliver results and give the people hope and risk upsetting the control system, so we need to remind everyone they belong to a global control structure, introduce a virus, and coordinate an exaggerated curfew response to remind everyone to be afraid and that we're really in control, not some new fangled ideologue making promises of renewed greatness and destruction of the control system

It's pretty clear who actually wields power in America.

The government could do nothing. But businesses who are answerable to nobody can do whatever they feel is best.

Hopefully they always make the right choice.......

The real danger isn’t in what people say on a platform where everyone disagrees. It’s going to be what happens when we have divided into different social networks, payment processors, banks, social networks, films, and credit unions. Do you know what you call people you can’t talk to? Enemies. It may be satisfying, but I can’t approve of these actions when I can foresee the horrific conclusion.

I encourage everyone to enable “showdead” in this thread to see which standards are being applied for flagging.

I encourage people to use Hacker News whichever way they want to. Many people respect this forum as a place for intelligent discussion. Unfounded claims that the election was stolen is not intelligent discussion. Unfounded claims that "ANTIFA" existed in any sort of widespread, organized fashion during the black lives matter protests are not intelligent discussion. Whataboutism surrounding the treatment of occasionally violent protests during BLM versus the treatment of an attempted coup lack the nuance surrounding the psychology, sociology, and power dynamics of the two situations being drastically different. That is not intelligent discussion. Unfounded claims that the insurrectionists were either ANTIFA agitators (they weren't) or were somehow peaceful as they chanted "hang Mike Pence" and searched for Nancy Pelosi with zip ties, are not intelligent discussion.

In fact, I lost a lot of respect for this community by turning on showdead. I'm not sure I'll be staying here much longer if this momentum of misinformation continues to grow.

@dang there is some clearly abusive use of flagging to silence opposing views in this thread. A sign of just how intolerant so many people have become. Please do something about it, like removing flag permissions from these users or making flagged comments remain visible. This behavior is toxic.

The best way to contact the mods is via the Contact link in the footer.

yeah, it's a big problem. If you're going to allow political discussions you should remove voting and flagging for those posts.

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