
Gab.com banned from PayPal - danso
https://twitter.com/getongab/status/1056283312522637312
======
acoyfellow
Breaking: Gab Upset by the same treatment they promise in their legal terms:
"Termination We may terminate your access to and use of the Services, at our
sole discretion, at any time and without notice to you." [1]

1- [https://gab.com/about/tos](https://gab.com/about/tos)

~~~
Meekro
Most companies have something in their ToS to the effect of "we can do
whatever we want" \-- that doesn't mean they're all the same. For example,
Stripe and PayPal both have essentially the same ToS. But only PayPal has so
many "banned for no reason" horror stories that there are multiple websites
dedicated to cataloging them.

~~~
yzmtf2008
Don’t conflate this story with “banned for no reason”. There are plenty of
reasons to ban Gab.

~~~
dev_dull
Are they doing anything illegal?

~~~
threeseed
In most countries, yes.

But illegality is not the issue here. People simply have a right not to be
associated with hate.

~~~
tinalumfoil
> a right not to be associated with hate

This is neither a right in any theoretical system of human rights I've seen,
nor is there any practical way to disassociate people from a basic human
emotion.

~~~
village-idiot
Free association implies the freedom to not associate. You can’t _make_ people
be associated with hate groups.

Also, don’t be cute about “hate”. We aren’t talking about the human emotion
and you know it.

~~~
tinalumfoil
In the context of this conversation people don't have the right to
disassociate with anyone they don't like. I'm not being "cute" about hate, and
whatever you think hate is isn't relevant to my point. People simply do not
have the right to do business with others chosen entirely from their own
personal discretion. The US government can and does force businesses to
provide services, at the risk of that business's existence, to unsavory
entities.

~~~
village-idiot
Affiliation with a hate group is not a protected characteristic.

------
stickfigure
I don't really have a take on gab.com (never heard of it until now) but a
couple years ago I was processing thousands of transactions per day with
PayPal. Their technology is awful and (from outside observation) their
engineering teams are incompetent.

In a business where "the hard technical problem" is how to stop fraud while
allowing legitimate transactions to occur, you'd expect bad engineering to
mean that the fraudsters win and the whole thing blows up. But what seems to
have happened is that they've simply overcompensated on the other side. It's
easy to stop fraud if you just flag everything as fraud. You end up with
pissed off annoyed users, but you don't go bankrupt.

It's too bad. I really wish PayPal was a vibrant alternative to Visa &
Mastercard; they fundamentally have the trust model right. It's just that
they've been failing at execution for decades now and even with the braintree
acquisition it looks like they're dead in the water, milking the last of their
fading reputation.

Stripe is really the class act here, but they're playing a very conservative
game. I wish they "owned" the payment process more instead of just being a
front for credit cards. Maybe someday.

~~~
dmartinez
Interesting thoughts. It could be that PayPal has over extended certain models
for far longer than they should have. Some forms of tech debt should be
resolved sooner, rather than later. It would be fascinating to know the real
reasons behind the fall from grace.

Is it really the employees, or the managers? There could be dilapidated
business processes still in place that even prevent the company from healing
itself. An interesting take on this is the book How The Mighty Fall.

Some relevant things to know might be if they have restructured a lot, and
what their churn has looked like both in the executive suite and in
engineering.

~~~
stickfigure
It's hard to be certain from the outside, but my impression is:

\- Fractured product line; they have a bunch of products that are similar but
different and they themselves are confused about which is which. Product
management is in chaos.

\- Tech debt from the 90s that has never been paid off.

\- Acquisitions that were poorly integrated.

\- Some weird attempt to mash their platform together with ebay that never
quite fully baked, then more debt incurred hastily ripping them apart again.

\- Some attempts at outsourcing development overseas? Can't be certain about
this, just an impression.

\- A major attempt to rewrite their API, but instead of simplifying they got
an architecture astronaut to design it. He wrote a lot of annoying blog
entries about HATEOAS but AFAICT no longer works at the company. The modern
API was published but it's broken and crippled in so many different ways that
they would be better off putting a big "DO NOT USE" at the top of their
documentation.

\- They've effectively abandoned the new API and apparently are relying on a
sort of reverse-takeover from Braintree to save them. Maybe there is progress
but it's been a while and I don't see any.

~~~
hakfoo
From my perspective, PayPal was always distracted by what it wanted to sell to
consumers, which impacted what it offered to retailers.

All most merchants wanted was "let me accept credit cards with quick and easy
setup, even if it's expensive." (Hence the success of Square, Stripe, etc.).
All they needed to do was to offer a few APIs that acted like every other
credit card gateway, and they'd be fine.

But instead, they went whole hog on telling consumers "you never need to give
the retailer a card number." Now, I'm skeptical this was ever a huge selling
point, but it means that any API they can ever offer will always be a
nonstandard mess to work with because it means you're going to have to bounce
users off your site to finish checkout.

------
fzeroracer
It should honestly come as no surprise considering Gab, much like Voat, is a
website filled with some of the most vitriolic and racist garbage I've ever
seen. No company wants to be associated with a walking PR disaster.

Most of the time however they're more than happy to take money from said
places as long as people don't make it into a big PR problem.

~~~
ben_jones
As bad is voat is I've seen that aspect of humanity on Youtube, Facebook, the
comment section of most major news sites, the live chat of twitch, etc.

~~~
bgilroy26
Historically, voat and gab were set up because its users disapproved of the
moderation on reddit and twitter. That differentiates the cultures on voat and
gab from their predecessors.

~~~
tptacek
That is an extraordinarily charitable way to describe the genesis of Gab,
which actually has roots in a YC batch (that its founder, Andrew Torba, was
kicked out of).

~~~
tomjakubowski
Could you say more about the Gab-YC connection?

~~~
tptacek
Torba had an unrelated YC startup during the batch that was running during the
2016 election season. He was ejected from YC for harassing batch-mates;
there's an HN thread about it you can find in the search bar. He started Gab
at just about the same time as he was kicked out of YC.

~~~
tzs
> He was ejected from YC for harassing batch-mates; there's an HN thread about
> it you can find in the search bar

This?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12934388](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12934388)

~~~
tptacek
I think so?

------
orf
It's funny how those who cry hardest about being censored, when given a
completely free space to express themselves, fill it to the brim with
xenophobia, racism, fake news and outlandish conspiracy theories involving the
Clintons

[https://gab.com/popular](https://gab.com/popular)

~~~
Mountain_Skies
Only in this particular cultural context. In the context of the Arab Spring
such a platform would have very different content. What does seem to be the
case is that every time someone attempts to deplatform the people writing
about the subjects you listed, their audience grows instead of shrinks. What
is the ultimate goal here because it seems like the deplatforming movement is
spreading the ideas they oppose much further than these people ever could have
on their own.

Is there a belief that we'll eventually reach a point where every single
platform accessible to humanity is closed to those with ideas that we find
unsavory? If not, then all of this seems to be causing much more harm than
good as each attempt to silence them turns into a megaphone.

~~~
pcwalton
> What does seem to be the case is that every time someone attempts to
> deplatform the people writing about the subjects you listed, their audience
> grows instead of shrinks.

Alex Jones' audience collapsed after he was banned from the major social
networks. Denying nonsense a megaphone works.

------
zarriak
I appreciate that fact that you can tell this is all just a front for beliefs
they don't have.

I mean if they really believe in free speech you would assume they would have
mentioned Julian Assange or Wikileaks once. It would have made a lot more
sense if they had ever mentioned how dangerous the censorship of Wikileaks by
monetary means was. Fortunately they never did this so you can reasonably
assume it is a front.

~~~
krapp
Most people who believe in free speech only believe in freedom for _their_
speech. That's just the way people are.

Extremists cry foul that their free speech rights are being violated or that
they're being censored but within their own groups they would quickly stamp
out opposing ideas or criticism.

~~~
mikeash
They do this because they see words as weapons to be used against their
enemies, nothing more. It’s not that they believe in freedom of speech
incompletely. They just know that freedom of speech is something other people
care about, and it can be used as a rhetorical weapon.

“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of
their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge.
But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to
use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the
right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous
reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight
in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but
to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will
abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for
argument is past.”

~~~
meowface
I don't understand what you're trying to claim. Are you suggesting the owners
of Gab are anti-Semitic?

~~~
mikeash
I’m suggesting that people who cry “freedom of speech” when others won’t do
business with them, while simultaneously suppressing dissent among their own
ranks, are using it as a rhetorical weapon rather than as a principle they
follow but I completely.

~~~
meowface
I agree with you, but in this situation, who is "suppressing dissent among
their own ranks"?

~~~
krapp
No one. Banning Gab.com isn't suppressing dissent, since Gab.com weren't
dissenting against Paypal. Also, Gab.com weren't in "the ranks of" Paypal, nor
was Paypal "in the ranks of" Gab.com.

Paypal had no apparent issue with Gab until recently, so politics being the
catalyst of Paypal's decision seems unlikely in this case, as they could have
banned Gab at any time. Rather, recent extenuating circumstances seem to have
made a client relationship with Gab no longer tolerable for Paypal.

------
kingvash
I find it a little humorous that they posted this to twitter

------
fjsolwmv
Atripe froze gab a few weeks ago, and PayPal put gab on notice for allowing a
post with the Navy Seal copypasta aimed at the PayPal CEO.

[https://gizmodo.com/stripe-freezes-gabs-account-for-nsfw-
con...](https://gizmodo.com/stripe-freezes-gabs-account-for-nsfw-content-
shining-a-1829503062)

------
rurounijones
Can someone provide background context for gab.com?

~~~
jsheard
It's ostensibly the "free speech" version of Twitter, in practice it mostly
caters to the far-right. The Pittsburgh synagogue shooter was a user:
[https://archive.fo/k63LE](https://archive.fo/k63LE)

His profile has now been nuked by Gab, but only to save face after the
shooting. They would usually pride themselves in not removing that kind of
content.

~~~
tptacek
It's worth noting that in its heyday --- usage on Gab appears to have
plummeted, at least measured by the front page, and seems to be dominated
today by bots --- the content on that page was absolutely par for the course
for the front page of the site. There was even a House candidate, Paul Nehlen,
who campaigned using almost identical anti-Semitic rhetoric on Gab.

You wouldn't want to leave anyone the impression that this kind of stuff was
somehow buried on individual user pages on Gab. Rather, it is the raison
d'etre for the whole site.

------
panarky
Does it require the slaughter of innocents to decide not to support hate?

~~~
atomical
It shouldn't. You could easily say that of Sergei Brin, Sundar Pichai, and
Jeff Bezos.

[https://www.google.com/search?biw=1280&bih=619&tbm=isch&sa=1...](https://www.google.com/search?biw=1280&bih=619&tbm=isch&sa=1&ei=btXUW5SMJK7ajgTlhLFI&q=MBS+jeff+bezos&oq=MBS+jeff+bezos)

Look at what a great time Bezos is having with MBS. Aside from executing
homosexuals and oppressing women he must be a really great guy.

~~~
village-idiot
Bezos is doing a great job of destroying his public image.

------
colemickens
I am sort of assuming this is related to this article?
[https://www.businessinsider.com/pittsburgh-synagogue-
shootin...](https://www.businessinsider.com/pittsburgh-synagogue-shooting-
gab-2018-10?utm_source=reddit.com)

Is Twitter, who also gave him a forum and declined to censor or punish him for
threatening tweets, being similarly affected?

~~~
kevingadd
Twitter doesn't use PayPal to process payments, does it?

~~~
colemickens
I assume not, but I figure someone does payment processing for them that an
upset crowd could apply pressure to?

I guess I was generally curious if people thought there'd be any sort of
similar repercussion(s) toward Twitter though. I finally got off Twitter a
couple months ago and can still imagine a likely "outrage bubble" yesterday
about their handling of that account, but with little actual impactful change
in user usage of the service, etc. (In fact, if anything, "major" events like
this likely drive a lot of traffic, even if there's criticisms.) (Please note,
I'm explicitly not commenting on whether or not I think the
criticism/handling/etc is appropriate or justified.)

------
Ice_cream_suit
The anti-Semitic mass murderer who killed eleven people at the Pittsburgh
synagogue today was a Gab user.

~~~
nisuni
Was he a Facebook user? Comcast customer? Did you use US Post? Maybe he used
to drive a Ford...

Should all of these businesses close?

------
Ice_cream_suit
Gab has been described as Reddit for Racists.

A quick glance at Gab seems to show a large number of hate groups. Perhaps
PayPal simply do not want the fallout that might ensue from that association.

Google has already removed the Gab app for violating their hate group policy.
Apple and Twitter have also removed them.

------
atomical
They are already on the crypto bandwagon but I can see how this would make it
more difficult for users.

------
radicalbyte
What is Gab? Some knock-off clothing brand? Their website returns a blank page
unless - I assume - you enable external scripts (which ain't happening).

~~~
VectorLock
Alt-right Twitter knockoff according to some other commenters.

------
Asparagirl
Good. Now for Stripe. I already called their customer support this morning and
told them I'd pull my organization's account unless they dropped Gab. I'm sure
I'm not the only customer who has. They enable payments processing for Gab,
which means that they also profit from Gab. They make money off the alt-right.
They _choose_ to make money off the alt-right.

You want protests in front of your office, Stripe, raising hell about the
blood money you take? We can surely arrange that. For every TechBro being oh-
so-concerned about "financial censorship, oh noes!": you ain't seen nothing
yet.

not doing business with white supremacist profiteers > nice API and
documentation

~~~
jesssse
Gab is a free speech platform.

Free speech != white supremacist

~~~
mikeash
Alt-right conspiracy nuts != free speech.

~~~
sneak
How do you figure?

~~~
mikeash
They’re different concepts, and disassociating with alt-right conspiracy
nutcases is unrelated to free speech.

~~~
DuskStar
_Banning_ alt-right conspiracy theory nutcases might just be related to free
speech, however. And that's what most people seem to want Gab to do.

~~~
beatgammit
Yes, it's related to free speech, but I just want to point out that it has
nothing to do with the US first amendment protections and likely has nothing
to do with free speech laws in other areas as well, since those only restrict
what government can do.

Choosing to disassociate from speech you don't like is yet another use of free
speech, as is banning groups that use speech you don't like from your private
platform.

So yeah, gab, Reddit, and Facebook are exercising their right to free speech.

~~~
sneak
I think you may be confusing “government infringement upon free speech rights”
and the much wider concept of “free speech” in general, which is the ability,
provided by common spaces and a soap box, or printing presses, and now by the
internet, that permits someone with something to say to reach their audience
who wishes to hear them.

There are a lot more people who have the ability to shut down a website,
regardless of hosting company choice, than have the ability to shut down
dissemination of a flyer or stop a speaker from speaking.

Yes, a TOS is freedom of association. That doesn’t mean it’s a good thing for
society when unpopular speech gets banned from every web host they use, in
order.

~~~
mikeash
It’s an interesting question. Speech on the internet does seem to depend on
the cooperation of big companies in a way that isn’t seen in other realms.

However, this seems to be drifting off topic. Gab’s web site didn’t get shut
down, they just got cut off by a payment processor.

~~~
sneak
Their web site is indeed being shut down. :/ I hate Gab and all the nazis they
host, but I am troubled about the difficulty in hosting the wider category of
unpopular speech.

------
dgzl
Was Gab actively supporting the hateful groups more than just giving them a
speech platform? Because if not, this is truly terrifying. It seems like the
"left" (whatever that means), with waves of ignorant support, is turning into
the monster it thinks it's fighting against.

~~~
pavlov
It’s easy to say everyone has the right to a platform, but an overwhelming
majority agrees that this shouldn’t apply to groups like pedophiles and
Islamic State. The antisemitic alt-right is growing more violent. When do they
cross the line, if you feel it hasn’t been crossed yet?

~~~
commandlinefan
I’m not sure that proving their consipracy theories accurate by censoring them
is going to make them _less_ violent.

------
raverbashing
Financial censorship is still censorship

~~~
zorpner
Paypal is not the government. Stop this absurd misrepresentation of
censorship.

~~~
WillPostForFood
Stop the absurd misrepresentation that only the government censor.

~~~
zorpner
That is literally true. Paypal is _choosing not to do business_ with someone.
Is your preference that companies must be forced to conduct business with all
comers?

~~~
Khaine
FFS the government has already forced people to do business with those they
don't like. You do remember the raison etre of the Civil Rights Act don't you?

I'm pretty sure companies in the 1960s South didn't want to serve black
Americans.

In fact, many want the Government to go further and force bakers to make cakes
for gay weddings when the owners don't support gay marriage [1]

[1] [https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-06-05/court-sides-with-
colo...](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-06-05/court-sides-with-colorado-
baker-on-same-sex-wedding-cake/9834790)

~~~
zorpner
You have completely failed to understand the jurisprudence surrounding the
idea of a protected class.

~~~
Khaine
The fact that the Government created protected classes is the entire point.
Government's already have forced businesses to do business with people. That
is a fact. This argument has nothing to do with what is and isn't a protected
class.

What is a protected class could be expanded and the Government can force
everyone to do business with unsavoury types.

