> According to one letter, penned by Epik’s SVP of strategy and communications, Robert Davis, PayPal inquired about offshore accounts, money transmission licenses, and "other queries related to cross‐border activities and law enforcement."
> “[The questions] were absolutely absurd, and well outside of any knowledge or experience we have as a domain registrar,” said Davis.
These sound to me like things PayPal very obviously should be asking of anyone using them to run a cryptocurrency.
Interesting that they've taken down the masterbucks page now linked in the article and with the archived note about tax advantages, and moved it to masterbucks.com which their FAQ claims they control: https://www.epik.com/support/knowledgebase/using-masterbucks...
Yes, I think many people commenting here have jumped to react to the headline with their own political views, not the article. Perhaps the title should reflect it's over money laundering, not content of Epik's clients.
Anyone who has read stories of or dealt with Paypal before knows they will cut off access if they even have an inkling of illegal activity happening. Their relationship with the banks and payment processors depends on it. So it's no surprise Epik advertising tax evasion using Paypal would get them terminated.
Epik doesn't really help their case with the response letter, it's written in a unhinged fashion without any substantiation of their claims of censorship by "Paypal executives".
It's kinda shitty if Epik knows they are participating in questionable business practices, can't answer basic questions needed for SEC, and then turn around and try to spit this out as the whole thing being political.
This hurts people who want to run independent alternative platforms in the long term.
They don’t care. Today’s political climate (in the US) encourages divisiveness, so if anything can be spun as a left vs. right issue, it will. Especially if it’s a far-left or far-right organization.
That's what you get when you start treating politics as though it is a teamsport instead of a way to run a country, and where parties try to undo as much as possible of their predecessors.
>This hurts people who want to run independent alternative platforms in the long term.
This is what I'm most concerned about.
If someone wants to get an independent registrar or other piece of infrastructure set up in the future, they shouldn't be associated with, or have to deal with the stigma of others that have done similar things just to end up conducting illegal activities. It will eventually lead people to believe that anyone who wants to break the mold will eventually do illegal things, so they might as well just not allow that to begin with.
They chose to not participate with PayPal, and invent their own currency, and in exchange, PayPal stopped dealing with them. Their questions were fairly basic KYC form-letter questions anyone selling a financial service should be able to answer - if they couldn't, they might be in trouble with the SEC, not just PayPal.
To be fair: the headline is quite clearly crafted to deliberately invite the culture war, and the clicks that come with it. The article itself rejects the premise in its very first sentence.
It's odd though cause Masterbucks isn't crypto, it's just a gift-card-esque balance service. Similar to how you'd have a PayPal "balance" you can send to other people or spend on stuff, and "top up" buy linking a CC or buying a card at 7-Eleven.
PayPal might've just realized they're a competitor.
PayPal is undeniably a money transmitter, a type of money service business that is required to required to register as such and perform certain minimum levels of compliance work.
If Masterbucks is "like PayPal" from that perspective, subject to certain de minimis thresholds, then they too are likely to require registration.
Frankly, if this is the case, and the Epik people are complaining that PayPal's due-diligence questions on these topics are "absolutely absurd, and well outside of any knowledge or experience [they] have as a domain registrar" then perhaps they oughtn't to be running that kind of a business?
It's fair, but is it PayPal's job to enforce that? If I sell MasterCard pre-paid cards at my corner store, will Visa come audit me and ask what sort of people I'm selling those cards to?
Yes. When you deposit the money you earned from your pre-paid cards in your bank account, once you reach a certain size your bank will certainly start asking how you are making money, and if you say "gift cards/cash equivalents that can be traded online" they will also start to ask you who you are selling these cards to. From the banks point of view, they don't want the FBI to come knocking saying that carders in Russia were using the banks money to launder purchases from stolen credit cards. If the bank can't cough up those records they are in hot water.
PayPal is the middleman that turns Masterbucks into cold hard cash into your bank account. If PayPal didn't enforce it, then in the eyes of the government PayPal is complicit also.
From my point of view, PayPal has a reasonable case to want to understand that its business partners are legally compliant if acting as a money service business.
Your example is not really the same. If you started using your merchant terminal to take payments on your own off-brand money transfer service, you can be pretty sure that you're going to get cut off just as soon as your processor finds out.
Genuine question here - what's the difference between them selling this 'currency' and buying in game currency on a video game? Or would those kind of things also have to comply with these kind of regulations?
If a video game in-game currency is "input only", as in, the value goes from the players to the company and stays there, it's effectively just a payment for a service.
If you allow transfers between users and cashing out to real money (as Epik's "Masterbucks"), then you'd have to comply with these kinds of regulations, so video games try and take steps to ensure that their currencies aren't treated like that, or at least if this does happen, they can't be seen as facilitating it. Epik's marketing material explicitly mentions both "fully transferrable" and "convertible to dollars" - this combination means that you're intentionally running a service that can be used for money transfers, and thus you need to ensure KYC (know your customer) and AML (anti money-laundering) compliance or shut down that service.
Video game currency is restricted to that video game, and most if not all video games have strict regulations against trading their currency for services outside of the game.
The currency they're selling purports to be a general-use currency for real life sales.
In the coming years, we may see the rise of separate economies based on political divide. I think this is where we are heading, and this will counterpart the world splitting the internet into nationally divided fragments.
Will they be significant economies though? Gab and Epik are mostly about culture wars and conspiracy theories. How many people are actively involved in those?
The history of explosive growth in tech platforms should make us very cautious about assuming small economies will stay small. It's been barely a decade since Facebook and Twitter were small platforms that didn't matter.
But as things are going you need to have a very limited ideologically worldview to not get expelled. And I am not taking about silly things like _Hitler was nice_. Do you want recent examples?
If you mention the following (you dont even have to support it or believe it) and many people complain there is a big chance you will be banned because of hate-speech:
1. There may be genetic differences in cognitive abilities between the sexes
2. Intelligence is highly dependent on genetics which may be expressed differently depending on the population clusters. i.e. East Asian people vs Sub-Saharan groups.
3. The killed of unarmed, black males by the police is statistically insignificant in the US and it is dwarfed by other more important issues.
4. What China is doing with the Uighurs and what France is planning to do with their Muslim population is something very similar in spirit and can show the inability to host a significant muslim minority in your country without being exposed to separatism movements based on religion.
5. It is ok to say "only women" menstruate
And on and on and on. The list is growing every day.
It's true, the list is growing every day. I remember not long ago how the term "sexual preference" became considered offensive overnight, purely for political reasons. It was interesting to see even the dictionary immediately change their definition in response to some twitter drama. Despite the fact that the offense is completely baseless, since people cannot freely change their preferences.
Something happened in the last 5 years or so. I am an old school leftist, by no means a Stalinist or so, but very much in favor of the former colonies rights, against imperialism, unilateral use of force, excessive power of multinationals, militarism, that sort of stuff. Let's say I am a crazy commie in the mold of Chomsky or Howard Zinn. Well, in the last 5 years, that left "poooft", evaporated, disappeared totally and now the only "opposition"to the usual suspects is a motley group formed by ex-tumblerinas, social media companies C-executives and their employees, mainstream democrats and celebrities,twitter comedians, and the problems are not more: "Why Grenada was invaded", "What is the future of Gaza" or even "Why are unions disappearing in America?", not more "Iran-Contra" or "Somalia intevention" Now the problems are "Is JK Rowling a TERF" "Should Colin Kapernick(sp) have an extra year of contract" "Is AOC college degree more prestigious than Trump's" When the top-20 Fortune companies are on your side I think it is time to reassess your priorities as a leftist movement, but no, that is not happening.
A decade ago Facebook had 500 million users. Not sure that's actually that small. It took them 2 years to double, and 5 years to double again (in 2017 they hit 2 billion).
That's how we see it in retrospect, but at the time it wasn't obvious that the industry was nascent. Many people saw them as strong competitors to Myspace and Friendster rather than anything fundamentally new; even once they got clearly past Myspace, it was quite common to hear people saying that the global demand for social media is probably saturated as they continued to grow.
(And of course, it wasn't obvious that Myspace was a nascent industry either when they launched in 2003!)
Without Visa, Mastercard or Paypal on the other side how can it survive? Cryptocurrencies as the current niche are hanging on, I suspect for as long as VMP permit them (ie buying bitcoin with a credit card). Everyone else, even Apple, go through them.
Separate economies don't necessarily have to be equal in capability. One may be the dominant while the other operates closer to being a black market, while not necessarily being an actual black market.
Maybe it would be based on cryptocurrency, or a more traditional form of currency that is centralized but isn't USD, for instance. Or someone with a lot of money decides that having dominance over a new economy takes the opportunity and forms their own "competitor" to Visa, but it operates within the economy that Visa decides it doesn't want to be a part of. Then again, maybe Visa one day leaks enough customers that it decides it's not worth being as moralistic.
It's really more of a bootstrapping issue than anything. You need to accept credit cards because that's what your customers expect to pay using.
If your customers start to expect to pay using some cryptocurrency, what do you need credit cards for?
First you have to reach a critical mass for the alternative payment system, but the more legitimate businesses that PayPal boots to the other side of the wall, the more mass there is on the other side of the wall.
It happens a lot today. Advertising targets lifestyle cohorts, and political orientation is part of that. if you polled Uber and Lyft users you'd find that they have very different views of the world. Same with McDonalds and Chick-Fil-A. Last year, I was on an American Airlines flight and it was notable that they played up patriotism in a way that Delta doesn't.
I haven't flown on American in ages. How do they play up patriotism? Like, if a soldier boards they announce it kind of stuff? Because I've seen that on Delta too.
>and this will counterpart the world splitting the internet into nationally divided fragments.
Perhaps, but how is this related to this story? Both epik and paypal are located in the US. If anything this points towards the internet being divided across partisan lines.
This, but also in that I think internet balkanization, if it takes off, will only make it easier to further balkanize it into "micronations" for different ideologies, or corporate brands.
To be clear: the domain registrar has been cut off.
I doubt that Paypal is going to be consistent about this; _I suspect that_ illegal content and hate sites can be found in the registries of many major registrars.
Still, it's a concerning development for anyone who may be using the same registration service as a future target.
Edit: I missed that they are alleged to be laundering money.
I think there is room to talk about what is an appropriate due process and/or orderly shutdown process for someone operating internet infrastructure such as a payment processor, ISP, registrar, etc.
Perhaps the registrar should have been taken over by some sort of court-appointed receivership, for example? The difficulty here is that there has been no judicial process, just PayPal making a corporate decision based on their contract.
I'm not saying that Paypal wasn't justified, just wondering if there might be a way to minimize collateral damage.
It was Epik’s responsibility to do an “orderly process” when they started acting as a money transmitter, it’s not PayPal’s job to compensate for Epik’s failure to comply with the law. The consequence for failing to comply with legal requirements are often sudden and disrupting; Epik really should have planned for this.
Continuing to service Epik despite a failure to follow AML laws actually exposes PayPal to risk, which is why they did a hard cutoff and not a phased shutdown. “We thought they were money laundering and kept serving them for a few weeks” is how you get prosecuted too.
You are just arguing that Paypal did what was necessary given the current law/SEC regulations, which I didn't disagree with.
I was trying to lift the scope of the discussion to a larger arena in which the role of the SEC certainly could be discussed, for example. Basically asking the question "Is there a better way to manage compliance?"
When it comes to potentially laundering money, the SEC doesn't give you a lot fo time for "orderly shutdown process". You should have gotten your documents in order before the SEC starts knocking on your door.
Please don't post unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments to HN. You not only broke the site guidelines by posting this, you did exactly the thing you were "suspecting".
Well, I mean, when they were banned from twitter, people said "build your own twitter", when they built gab and got banned from credit cards processors they said "build your own financial system", when they got banned from cloudflare they were told "build your own internet backbone" etc... At which point this is not censorship when companies equivalent to public infra with big public contracts and ties to the government using public infrastructure paid by the people ban you from their services? I mean, imagine if this was happening to some people in China, people would immediately call it censorship, and rightfully so.
So, if you go to some business and shit on the floor, maybe we can ban you from the business, the roads that reach said business, ban you from public transportation, ban you for owning a car, bicycle, motorcycle and maybe ban you from owning property. That will show you!
I was thinking more Comcast and other ISPs. I could easily see Twitter mobs pressuring Comcast to knock a self-hosted server offline if the server is hosting something the Twitter mob doesn't like.
Self-hosted servers are already against Comcast TOS, they tolerate them for casual use but any significant traffic is going to result in a service interruption.
> And what's to stop whichever company is hosting me from dropping hosting at the first whiff of a Twitter mob?
Money that you pay them for the service. This is almost always enough since that's all any of these companies actually care about. There are very rare exceptions where high-profile nazi groups have had their service contracts rescinded, but this isn't a real problem in practice. Nobody is having their service contract rescinded because their website is made up of conservatives, which is usually the implied subtext in these discussions.
> So you are saying free speech on the internet is incompatible with a capitalist economy?
No. I'm asking you how you envision people owning their own websites without any private companies involved, in an economy built around the concepts of corporate ownership.
> Money that you pay them for the service. This is almost always enough since that's all any of these companies actually care about.
"almost always" is not a guarantee of free speech.
> There are very rare exceptions where high-profile nazi groups have had their service contracts rescinded, but this isn't a real problem in practice.
...yet. What is "very rare" today can become "more common" tomorrow if there aren't strong legal protections.
> No. I'm asking you how you envision people owning their own websites without any private companies involved, in an economy built around the concepts of corporate ownership.
IANAL, but clearly there needs to be stronger legal protections in this arena. My ISP should not be able to disconnect me from the internet on the basis of speech. They should be like a utility company. My power company can't disconnect my electricity if I use the electricity to charge batteries for a megaphone that I then use to spread hate speech. My ISP/server host should be the same. Charge me for the compute resources I use, do not attempt to disconnect my service on moral or ethical grounds. Leave that to a higher layer in the stack.
> "almost always" is not a guarantee of free speech.
There is no such guarantee with respect to someone else's private property.
> What is "very rare" today can become "more common" tomorrow if there aren't strong legal protections.
Yes, that's the slippery slope fallacy. I could make a similarly flawed argument in reverse, e.g. allowing Nazi propaganda to flourish unchecked is what lead to the rise of Hitler, so we should make Nazi ideas illegal before the acceptance of nazi ideas in wider society becomes "more common". Just to be clear, I am not actually arguing this position, only demonstrating why this reasoning is fallacious. Simply pointing to the existence of a rare event is not evidence that it will become more common.
> My ISP should not be able to disconnect me from the internet on the basis of speech
I agree, but only because ISPs control a shared, finite, public resource (the physical ISP lines, paid for in large part by the tax-payer).
> server host should be the same
No they shouldn't because they're not at all the same.
You dont, that's the point. The people saying that are being disingenuous, they know what they final goal is. If any of the measures, would have been taken against people they agree ideologically with they would be up in arms. Compare the reactions to the case when a gay couple drove hundreds of miles to specifically ask to a well known bakery owned by conservatives to make them a gay wedding cake, the guys refused btw silly thing and all the mainstream media wouldnt shut up about censorship. When the same thing is done to right-wingers you get OP's reaction, "stop complaining and create your own Visa, Amazon and Youtube"
Yes, they are vastly different on a legal level. Still, I think the parent comment's analogy is very valid.
AFAIK I don't know any instances of, say, car companies refusing to sell a car to the KKK or some other neo-Nazi group, and I think a lot of people would be very uneasy if all your purchases, even from private companies, were vetted based on your political ideology. To clarify, I don't think that's what's happening in this instance (as others have noted this looks like a set of pretty standard KYC questions), but I think it's very fair to ask why we think certain company behaviors that would be pretty unacceptable in the physical world should be acceptable in the online world.
We always look at who our prospects are and if they are unethical then we will be more than happy to deny them service. It's happened a couple of times now.
Doesn't sound too far off from sending people to jail if they break the rules of their society. Difference being that holding certain beliefs isn't illegal, at least not yet in America, so society throws in what you might consider a "civil jail".
Also let's not pretend that these people's rights are getting unfairly stripped from them - they are not entitled to accessing any of these services. Further, it's not like they are banned from all these things, it's more like not letting them on stage during an open mic night - they can still browse all aspects of the internet.
As I understand it, the reason a physical business would ban someone engaging in the behaviour you described is that it would create costly first-order work for the business (cleaning up) and result in a second-order loss of profits due to deterring other customers until the cleanup is complete. Does anything of the sort apply in the case of politically questionable entities using a near-monopolist payment processor to process payments?
Providing services to African Americans and homosexuals would have been a PR disaster historically. You shouldn't be denied access to critical services like this because of unpopular political beliefs.
Honestly, it's worrying I even have to say this. It's utterly nuts people here are defending this.
You can't stop being African American, and it's generally accepted that homosexuality is the same.
You can stop being a Proud Boy. If you look at what are deemed by law to be "protected classes", they are generally things that can't be readily changed - age, gender, disability, race.
How does one change their political believes? I'd argue that some of my political beliefs are as firm and unchangeable as my sexual preferences.
But to play along with your logic here, what if someone was a member of a feminist organisation? Do you believe it would be acceptable for a company to refuse to do business with people who are members of feminist organisations?
And if your argument is that it's possible to pretend not to be a feminist, can the same not also be said for someones sexual orientation?
> Do you believe it would be acceptable for a company to refuse to do business with people who are members of feminist organisations?
On a legal level, yes. I would avoid doing business with that company as a result, but they'd be well within their rights to do it. I'd be well within my rights to boycott and tell my friends about it.
> And if your argument is that it's possible to pretend not to be a feminist, can the same not also be said for someones sexual orientation?
My employer's health insurance would allow me to add a same-gender spouse, but doesn't ask if they're a feminist.
On the other hand, you think it's fair and reasonable that a business be compelled to transact with customers that they believe might be net bad for business?
You say "unpopular political belief", I say "DDoS target, litigation risk, potential product boycott".
Can it, though? I think a key argument being made is that Paypal is essentially without alternative. People may have convulsions on social media and write angry messages to support hotlines, but hardly anybody is in a position to actually reduce their usage of it in order to make a point. This precludes the second-order effect; no first-order effect exists to begin with, because Paypal has no meaningfully limited physical resources that are occupied or rendered unusable by political poop.
Money is speech, so says the supreme court (Citizens United). Impeding the transfer of fiat (infra which should be a utility) is a violation of constitutional rights (arguably) if you're not breaking the law. Even if I disagree with the speech (I do! Vehemently!), rights must be inalienable.
Maybe this should be patched in Section 230 legislation versus 18 USC § 1960, would have to read more statute to provide a proper opinion on which statute should protect money as speech transmittal (IANAL, would like to hear a JD's legal opinion).
So people should be able to send money abroad to terrorism outfits? I think you are taking the "money is speech" conservative position, and stretching it to its atomic limits.
Speech is not terrorism, nor physical violence. It is hyperbole to argue otherwise. Yes, many forms of speech are distasteful, or downright grotesque (hate speech, for example), but it is absolutely not the same as an act of terrorism.
[The idea that the government may restrict] speech expressing ideas that offend … strikes at the heart of the First Amendment. Speech that demeans on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, age, disability, or any other similar ground is hateful; but the proudest boast of our free speech jurisprudence is that we protect the freedom to express “the thought that we hate.” -- Justice Samuel Alito [1] [2]
In no way is "Impeding the transfer of fiat" or "Impeding speech" by a business "a violation of constitutional rights." Like, just to put this in a less contentious context - think about an employer. An employer is allowed to stop an employee from speaking about things, or can punish or fire them for their speech. There isn't some inalienable right to speech. There is a constitutional right to the government not being able to forbid speech as a general rule. But that has no affect legally on a company denying service to someone they disagree with.
Just to make sure I've covered all my bases here: If this was about denying services to a protected class, then you'd have a different response for a different reason -- businesses cannot discriminate on the basis of a protected class. But political beliefs are not a protected class.
As for changing Section 230. The Senate could certainly do all sorts of things to change the way this works. It's clearly an interstate commerce issue, so the federal government could pass all sorts of laws. I don't have an opinion one way or another about how they'd do it, since that's more policy than law.
I appreciate it! I frequently interface with policymakers on technology issues (both to advocate for policy and as a neutral advisor), and I always want to approach those conversations as educated as possible (otherwise, I do a disservice to both those relying on my expertise, and those they represent).
There is so much shortsightedness with the modern pro-censorship crowd. Do they assume censorship will never be applied to their side because they aren't the "evil" ones?
> when they built gab and got banned from credit cards processors they said "build your own financial system"
As a free speech absolutist, I'm always a little optimistic when I see this sort of thing happen, because it always has the opposite effect than its intent: the censors expect that the things they don't like to disappear completely as if they had never existed, but what ends up happening is that censorship drives further decentralization, which is even harder to censor. This event exposed another single point of failure - its up to the infrastructure to fix that.
You’re ignoring that they refused to answer the KYC laws in the US. You know, those laws that require PayPal to ask certain questions, and to refuse business if they don’t answer?
Except that is explicitly not the argument of those that actually want these folks deplatformed, but those that fear their own speech will somehow be in danger and want to solve every issue in existence with technology.
The "it could happen to you argument" is really tiring. Gab is abusing your idealism. If you spent any amount of time on Gab you'd know it was a deeply right wing bubble full of hate, with a lot of harassment coordination happening. I say has because it has gone a bit out of fashion and these people moved on to Parlor now. This is not merely a place where people have opinions (that someone thinks are bad). That exists on YouTube. If the bar really was "the consensus thinks you're wrong, filled with bias and not interested in productive exchange", Stephen Crowder, Dennis Prager and Tim Pool would not be on YouTube. James Damore would not have been on every conservative program in existence. Society has drawn a line, and you can argue if it's too strict or leniant, but to say we could never draw one without the possibility of false positives is defeatist idealism.
Sites like Gab or, let me dare mention their name, Kiwi Farms, are different. They facilitate material harm in a very tangible clear-cut way. They are very definitely beyond the point where tolerance does not actively work to destroy itself.
> At which point this is not censorship when companies equivalent to public infra
But they aren't public infrastructure. Twitter isn't. Cloudflare isn't. CC companies aren't.
They are private companies, and as as these people were fine with private companies denying services to left-leaning individuals in the past, they don't have much of a leg to stand on now that they are on the receiving end of it.
So you're basically in the same space as porn (not that I'm comparing porn to right wing activists!): People DDoS you, payment providers don't want to do business with you, social media companies only accept you if you adhere to their strict rules (no nipples, no close ups of your intimate parts, nothing explicit) - where is the outrage regarding the people who had to deal with this since the birth of the mainstream internet?
Are they? Some may be, such as proud boys and dailystormer may be afoul of some (vague) hate speech clauses. Others may not be.
paypal and CC companies also shut down donations to wikileaks long ago (long before Trump was a thing). And even shut down donations to other foundations, such as the Wau Holland Stiftung of the Chaos Computer Club[0], that collected donations in part for wikileaks.
My first real memory of paypal was paypal shutting down the account we used to collect donations to cover server costs for a forum we ran back in the day[1], without any appeals process and freezing all assets, effectively stealing the money[2].
I also find it fascinating e.g. that cloudflare still protects botters (aka outright declared criminals) and people selling child porn[3] (aka the worst of common criminals), but dailystormer, as vile as they are, are somehow too much.
[1] the forums was a rather benign thing, just for chitchat, nobody sold anything, and it wasn't about anything illegal either. We never got an explanation from paypal, but the account shutdown coincided with a DMCA request for a single red carpet picture some user posted in a thread about the Emmy's. We removed that picture, by the way.
[2] Paypal wrote that they would refund the money, but some of our members reported they never did get a refund.
[3] I and some other people repeatedly reported a website selling child pornography for crypto (or for users submitting "original content"), mostly of the blackmailed-into-performing-lewd-acts variety targeting young teens and even pre-teens. While we had some success in getting domain registrars to nuke the domains in the past, this only lead to domain hopping, and finally the operator found a registrar that doesn't care (currently a Ukrainian company and .su/.pk domains). Every time the websites were behind cloudflare and every time cloudflare responded to our requests with "we're just a reverse proxy and forwarded it to the hoster" and didn't do anything. The current incarnations of those websites are still online a month later.
Wait, so it's just dandy that private organizations can and do censor as they please, but it's wrong to demand of them to not do business with cyber criminals and people selling child porn?
> I also find it fascinating e.g. that cloudflare still protects botters (aka outright declared criminals) and people selling child porn[3] (aka the worst of common criminals), but dailystormer, as vile as they are, are somehow too much.
The publicly stated motivations behind terminating dailystormer are that dailystormer allegedly suggested that Cloudflare supported them. The content wasn’t the issue, the suggested endorsement was:
EDIT: this doesn’t gel with my memory of the events at the time, which were that the site got terminated because the CEO or CTO was in a bad mood, mind. It may be some post-hoc rationalisation to make it more palatable and give them cover against the things you’re saying. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Yeah, the CEO decided to terminate their account because he didn't like them. The bit about "endorsement" was just a rationalization after the fact.
>“Literally, I woke up in a bad mood and decided someone shouldn’t be allowed on the Internet,” Prince wrote in an internal memo to employees obtained by Gizmodo and published on Wednesday. “No one should have that power.”
"ties to the government?" Even if that were more than vague and nebulous, it's still not "actually the government." Private companies terminating accounts of their own volition is not censorship.
You can draw the definition as widely as you like: not even the ACLU says that censorship carried out by private citizens is illegal or that the right response to it is more laws.
I didn't say either, I didn't say it was illegal - quite the opposite - or that the right response is more laws.
However, I did say in the past, that in certain circumstances I do think the right response is laws. There are laws e.g. prohibiting utility companies from refusing customers they do not like like people who criticize the company or nazis and "nazis".
I do think that common infrastructure companies (analog to the utilities companies, just essential digital services) such as cloudflare, dns registrars, hosting and cloud providers shouldn't be allowed to discriminate against people with the "wrong" opinions.
And even "social media" companies of a certain size/marketshare/market power should be severely limited in what they can censor (e.g. banning nudity and porn and gore etc is OK in my opinion, banning speech inciting violence is too, if narrowly defined, banning people because they belong to a certain political party or stream is not). Yeah, here be dragons; it would be hard to find a good balance, but given the alternative of a few (social) media companies right now growing ever more powerful it still would be the right thing to do.
>I do think that common infrastructure companies (analog to the utilities companies, just essential digital services) such as cloudflare, dns registrars, hosting and cloud providers shouldn't be allowed to discriminate against people with the "wrong" opinions.
I don't think that's a good analog. In your area there's only one electric/water/gas company, and 2-3 wired telecoms (eg. phone, cable, maybe fiber). You don't really have much of a choice there. However, there are dozens of CDNs, domain name registrars/dns providers, and hosting providers.
It doesn't matter if there are dozens of CDNs. Look at what happened to dailystormer, they were unable to find a CDN. Yes, they are bad nazis and are pretty much underserving of anybody's pity, but it still shows how easily those few market players (and an angry twitter mob) can banish stuff from the internet, driven by some public outrage.
There is a handful of CC companies and payment processors. Look at what happened to adult performers and sex workers (even the ones operating completely within the law): they cannot even get a bank account once they are found out to be in those businesses.
Want to run a legal dispensary selling legal weed? Though luck, no banking for you either, and even finding a datacenter that will take your servers will be tough.
The market position of the big players, network effects and also often the regulatory capture makes sure you cannot just "build your own" in a lot of areas. And even if there is competition - like there is with hosting - you'd be hard pressed to find a hoster that will have you. And even once you found such a hoster, it probably will not last because angry mobs start to write emails to that hoster, or DDoS it.
>It doesn't matter if there are dozens of CDNs. Look at what happened to dailystormer, they were unable to find a CDN. Yes, they are bad nazis and are pretty much underserving of anybody's pity, but it still shows how easily those few market players (and an angry twitter mob) can banish stuff from the internet, driven by some public outrage.
My claim isn't that they didn't face any censorship, but that the scenario is not analogous to utilities, like you proposed earlier. Furthermore, if we're talking about dozens of market players, how is this any different than ye olden days where there's only a few dozen print shops within 1 day horse ride, and all of them refusing to print your pamphlets? It seems like your position is "no businesses shouldn't be able to discriminate on ideology", not just "common infrastructure companies [...] shouldn't be allowed to discriminate against people with the 'wrong' opinions"
>There is a handful of CC companies and payment processors. Look at what happened to adult performers and sex workers (even the ones operating completely within the law): they cannot even get a bank account once they are found out to be in those businesses.
Many payment processors don't want to deal with adult/sex content not because they're puritans, but because it's associated with high rates of fraud. I don't see anything wrong with dropping clients that turn out to be more trouble than they're worth. Furthermore, the problem you describe doesn't really exist. There are processors dedicated to processing adult content however, as evidenced by sites like onlyfans.
>Many payment processors don't want to deal with adult/sex content not because they're puritans, but because it's associated with high rates of fraud.
They always claim that, and yet they make billions from it, also by extorting huge premiums (something like 1K upfront + 30%-40% of the revenue as fees and a minimum of fees you have to pay regardless even if your revenue is below that).
But I wasn't even talking about people selling adult content. I was talking about people appearing in adult content, aka "porn stars". Even if you're solely a contract porn star working for studios instead of selling your own content directly, you'll be hard pressed to find personal banking once you're discovered to have a job like this (in the US).
>Want to run a legal dispensary selling legal weed? Though luck, no banking for you either, and even finding a datacenter that will take your servers will be tough.
If we're talking about the U.S., Federal law still maintains that marijuana is a Schedule I drug. It is hardly surprising that banks and other service providers are hesitant to form relationships with customers whose primary business is "illegal drug trafficking" from a U.S. government perspective.
You say that now, but if the political winds change in future and progressive ideals and orgs are then labeled "hate speech", promoting violence, I suspect there will be much wailing and gnashing of teeth.
PayPal isn’t cutting them off because of who they host, they’re cutting them off because they’re selling a cryptocurrency and couldn’t meet AML regulations.
It’s very frustrating how many people here are falling into the trap of fighting out this culture war issue when it doesn’t seem to be supported by the facts in the article.
If liberal ideals of fairness, equality and so on become considered "hate speech" I believe that the society suffering through that will have much bigger problems to tackle than companies' censorship.
Talking as if this didn’t already happen in the McCarthy era. What good company to be in. Same tactics, different ideals. Just as wrong. Just as convinced you’re right.
Because you dont care about the substance of the argument or its logical conclusions, you only care about the political points in the current environment.
If tomorrow Facebook, Twitter and Google decide to ban all criticism, of Zuckeberg,Dorsey or Brin calling it "hate speech", the problem will be EXACTLY the same: corporations censoring things, nothing else. I do not like when they do it to Alex Jones not because I like him but because I dont like the precedent to be set for other more valuable sources in the future. But the mechanism is exactly the same, if you dont defend "the untouchables" now, dont expect people to defend "your team" in the future.
Um. That is exactly what has been happening with the rhetoric around otherizing anything in opposition to Trump. The President of the United States has called for this himself, which should be a bigger alarm bell than a corporation enacting a policy.
Money laundering is a sham. It's like saying that it's really about potential resisting arrest.
The premise of money laundering is that you're a criminal engaged in some kind of profitable criminal enterprise and it should be illegal for you to hide the source of your ill-gotten gains. But nothing about the laws against money laundering require them to apply only to someone engaged in underlying criminal activity, so people who are doing nothing wrong regularly end up ensnared in them regardless.
And they're a massive invasion of privacy, because they in practice require you to have all of your purchases tracked. As if it's Mastercard's business whether you buy birth control, or what books you read, or who you split your restaurant bill with.
Meanwhile anyone engaged in the actually-bad money laundering is doing so because of some criminal activity that they were already subject to prosecution for. You don't need laws against money laundering to go after a drug dealer because you can already charge them with drug dealing.
So in practice what they actually get used for is things like this -- oppression of political undesirables, who need privacy because they're politically vulnerable and then get booted out of the financial system over it, even if they're breaking no other laws.
> If some of y'all put the time you spent into defending white supremacists and hate platforms
And how do you define this? Have you ever once considered you could be wrong and they could be right?
The freedom of speech is the freedom to disagree. It's the freedom to talk about things we know are unorthodox and offensive, and not fear prosecution from our government (In the context of US/constitution speech).
At one time, saying homosexuality can be a normal and healthy behavior was considered hateful, evil and dangerous. People lost their publications, their friends and sometimes their lives for that idea.
At one time saying black people should be able to have all the same rights as white people; drink from the same fountains, have the same bus seats, and use the same bathrooms, was considered wrong, insane, and a dangerous idea.
The freedom to say things has never been easy. In some countries, we try to protect it. It was one thing when it was the printing press or books, but now we're talking about massive distribution platforms, with insane reach, and very very few companies who have risen to positions where they can be gatekeepers.
You can say it's fine when they go after someone you don't like, but what about when they cut funding for your Mastodon server or phpBB board because of a few posts you've put up they don't like?
I understand the point you are making and think that normally there is merit to it.
However, I think it's important to point out there is a difference between saying "homosexuals and black people should have equal legal and societal rights" versus whatever language these people use to justify their beliefs in white supremacy.
>Have you ever once considered you could be wrong and they could be right?
No, I've never once considered the possibility that white supremacists could be right.
If eventually in 200 years the world believes that white supremacists were right and I'm on the wrong side of history, then I'll die being very, very wrong and I'm fine with that.
IMHO, The problem isn't that people should be accepting of any sort of racial supremacy ideology.
The problem is that the accusation isn't necessarily true and there needs to be room to argue about that. Otherwise the accusation is a weapon that can be used without justification and without recourse.
If the Proud Boys want to set up their own media outlet, nobody's stopping them. They can do whatever they can to convince people that they're good folks.
However taking and spending money, that's not something anybody can do for any reason. We have lots of regulations on commerce, and unless there's very good reason for it, we don't force anyone to do business with anyone.
We force companies to hire and fire in non-discriminatory manners, again, because money is power, and discrimination is punching down, and we as a society don't like that.
In order to do this, we use the force of law. Adding a protected group to the categories of people that we cannot discriminate against requires legislative action. There's a public debate and legislators' votes go on record. We use legislation to regulate the aggregation and use of power.
The legal remedy for breaking that is a lawsuit. It's a long, drawn out process whose primary deterrent mechanism is punitive damages. Being the company that has to pay that black person millions of dollars because you decided they weren't worth hiring is not a fun time.
That's the way the system works. If Epik feels they have standing for a discrimination lawsuit against PayPal, I'm sure their lawyers have already it drawn up. Something tells me they won't.
The Proud Boys are just going to have to find someone else to handle their money.
You can clearly define and enshrine intolerance based on immutable physical characteristics into speech laws, as many countries have done (Canada, Germany, etc).
Sorry, this is not a "clear slippery slope fallacy".
A slippery slope fallacy is a claim about a series of events, with each even being more unlikely than the one before it. GP makes no claim of a series of events at all.
GP is merely pointing out that often, societal norms have been immoral, despite the "wisdom of the time" saying that challenging the norm is immoral. And society doesn't realize they were wrong until the normal has been challenged. By not allowing a society to challenge the norms, the norms may never change.
It is your example that is fallacious. You bring up Canada and Germany, even though we have no idea how good or bad of an impact those laws will have. And more importantly, how dangerous it is to even give a government power to restrict this sort of speech. We don't know the conclusion.
Sorry, you missed something. The parent post literally called out the next step on the "slippery slope": "but what about when they cut funding for your Mastodon server or phpBB board because of a few posts you've put up they don't like?"
> You bring up Canada and Germany, even though we have no idea how good or bad of an impact those laws will have
This makes no sense. We literally do know how good or bad of an impact these laws will have _because there are literally examples of countries with those laws_.
The example in this article is a little different because Epik was cut off because their cryptocurrency operation didn't make any attempt to be right with the SEC.
As far as Canada goes, Mike Ward was fined $80,000 for making a joke. Mark Meechan was fined £800 in the UK for a comedy routine where he taught his dog to make a Hitler salute. I have personally know many Germans who have told me there are things they cannot criticize or say because they are German (referring to the Israeli/Palestine conflict).
That's because many of us consider freedom of speech to be more important than anti-racism for the simple reason that without freedom of speech, you lose everything, including anti-racism and all the rest.
That's not true at all. Canada has both strong anti-hate-speech laws and a far lesser (though still existant) problem with racism and racial justice overall than the US. Freedom of speech always has limits.
To be honest, I know where most people stand on free speech when I see them saying that we shouldn't allow anyone to call for anyone else to be fired. I think freedom of speech is so important that I will defend to the death your right to ask for me to be fired.
> That's not true at all. Canada has both strong anti-hate-speech laws and a far lesser (though still existant) problem with racism and racial justice overall than the US. Freedom of speech always has limits.
Canada also has far less "visible minorities" than USA.
> a far lesser ... problem with racism and racial justice overall than the US
On what basis are you making that claim?
Asking as a Canadian-US dual citizen with 20+ years of lived non-white experience in both countries. I don't think these things are so easy to measure and my experience has largely been that every other country likes to pretend they have fewer race relations problems than the US and the claims largely rest on anecdata and media driven sentiment.
“Freedom of speech” in any meaningful sense has only ever existed for wealthy people (who are historically white male landowners) or those of other classes whose speech is deemed “appropriate” by such gatekeepers.
Just look at what happens when employees try to unionize: their employers go to great lengths to silence them, and have spent considerable political capital removing regulations preventing them from doing so. If you have money and power, it’s always been easy to silence speech you don’t like.
This is as ridiculous as people who say "Why don't we all just get along?"
Some are skeptical of megacorporations controlling the economics of information, the potential wrongs of moral control, without necessarily defending detestable people, in the same way those who defend freedom of speech aren't defending Mein Kampf.
I really wish more people could wrap their heads around this idea, because it's so important.
There is no a priori way to suppress "bad" speech and also
* not suppress ideas that are good but unpopular
* not suppress speech that is valid criticism that annoys the powerful
* not suppress speech that is valid criticism that annoys the majority
* not suppress speech that is true but makes most people uncomfortable
* not suppress speech that is true but also most people don't believe
But! With strong free speech protections, no one can suppress ideas that are good but unpopular; nor ideas that are valid criticism, even those that annoy the powerful and the majority; etc.
Here are examples of hate speech laws being used in unexpected, and unexpectedly awful, ways. And, these uses are inevitable and unsurprising to those of us who have a deeper philosophical understanding of how free speech works:
The leader isn't even white, nor are most of their members. He was on a youtube podcast recently, with Tim Pool I think, something definitely doesn't make sense between what the media is constantly parroting about them and what they actually are.
Wikipedia might be good for small, factual articles. But for anything remotely controversial, it leans hard-left. Larry Sanger's blog post gets it head on:
The Prod Boys are too new, but whenever you look at an older controversial topic, ALWAYS read the Talk page first, and also, go back 10 years in the history and read that version of the article and the first version.
If you're referring to the sentence containing “several members have been affiliated with white supremacy”, it kinda doesn't jive with the fact that their highest leadership position is filled by an afro-cuban man, and the fact that there is no official or de-facto-official Proud Boys public communication of anything regarding white supremacy other than condemnation of it, nor any official or sanctioned actions taken against visibly non-white groups or people.
I mean, if there were white supremacists in the Proud Boys, something that isn't even alleged in that article, surely they would not continue once the group was being led by a man who is like 25-75% black.
The only reason they are being framed so aggressively as white supremacists now, is that Joe Biden mentioned them on the debate stage. Rather than accounting for Joe Biden's ignorance or malice, the media preferred to alter public perception to justify his comments; and it looks like it sorta worked!
CNN, NYT etc are most certainly not telling the truth about them. Things are far less, to use a pun, black and white but their name is getting dragged through the mud by various outlets, journalists and politicians as if they were the incarnation of the next reich.
> There are three degrees of membership within the Proud Boys, and to become a first degree in the “pro-West fraternal organization” a prospective member simply has to declare “I am a western chauvinist, and I refuse to apologize for creating the modern world.”
The Proud Boys describe themselves as a "Western chauvinist". White supremacists have used "western values" as code for "white" for a long time. Chauvinism is the belief in the superiority of a group. "Western chauvinist" literally means "white supremacist". If you don't believe me, read the many quotes in the SPLC article above.
They are not white supremacists no matter what the overtly biased SPLC says. Many of them are not even white, and their chairman is black. Trying to push this smear is just silly at this point. The media have taken to calling all anti-BLM or anti-antifa counter protesters “white supremacists” and it’s quite ridiculous.
That's enough of what, Dan? This comment was substantive, responsive to the parent comment, and cordial; it didn't provoke a flame war nor could it be expected to, it didn't include any quips or sick burns.
If you don't like moderating after all this time, and I wouldn't blame you, at least understand I can't help other people spamming the flag button because they disagree with people's good-faith interpretation of facts. If there's a technical solution to that I'd be glad to help.
Using HN for political and ideological battle, and especially race wars. That's not what HN is for. HN is for intellectual curiosity, and nobody who repeatedly gets into arguments about these things is using the site that way—rather, it's all about defeating enemies, which is not the intended spirit.
"Facts" is a red herring. There are infinitely many facts and they don't select themselves, nor do they interpret themselves or present themselves. Humans do all of that and we are driven by motives, not facts.
Unfortunately, the self-styled "anti-racists" of today are giving me a tough time convincing actual Neonazis that there isn't some sort jewish marxist conspiracy out there to censor them.
Unfortunately “anti-racism” has been weaponized as a shortcut for silencing anyone who may at one point have said something that could be interpreted as racist or even not anti-racist enough. No thanks.
Rather be labeled as a racist and keep my free speech than silenced by some mob authority.
Yep, welcome to the world where people will argue for "more free speech" on a forum that's carefully tended and moderated to remove the extremely vile, low-quality stuff that kills other forums.
Free speech _always_ has limits. Absolutism is a naïve way to view any aspect of society (whether it's free speech, socialism vs capitalism, etc).
Sorry, that's a very weak statement and easily refuted. By what measure? The US ranks below Canada on the HFI. On many quality of life lists, the US is far below nordic countries.
You may want to examine your circumstances and see if you'd still feel the same way if you were one or more of black, female, gay, or a persecuted minority (I'm assuming you are none of these, but feel free to correct me).
The US imprisons more people than China. The US enslaves its prison population. The US justice system tricks innocent people into pleading guilty using a clearly corrupt plea bargaining system. There is nothing just about American justice.
It doesn't matter what the circumstances are. Your very post here proves my point more than any further elaboration on my part ever could.
A mere 30 years ago, everything you just said here would have gotten _you_ banned from most clubs, small businesses, shopping centers, and religious organizations. Today, you get rewarded with a bunch of social media points for making statements like yours.
I'm also Canadian, white, straight, male and can afford to piss off potential future and my current employers with my posts and just retire if I wanted to. But I don't let that illusion cloud the fact that there are many people who don't have my luck who find the world we live in incredibly unjust.
You need to tap your empathy and look at the life experiences of others in different circumstances. Would they consider society just?
This may or may not have been a political move, but the theme of certain partisans celebrating when their perceived enemies are deplatformed is disturbing, especially given the parallel phenomenon of politically inconvenient stories being termed "Russian disinformation" that's our societal imperative to suppress.
It shouldn't require too much of your imagination to wonder if one day you will be on the wrong end of this corporate shunning. Jacobin for example is complaining Facebook is blocking their pro-Marxist posts on Bolivia. If your position is "the values enforced by these trillion dollar multinational companies will surely never come into conflict with my own!" you're a fool or a stooge.
Are you allowed to celebrate if you (as a minority group, possibly individually) are materially hurt by these platforms?
Also this is far from corporate shunning, these are deeply socially unacceptable positions too. PayPal already has a long list of things it deems unacceptable. When I worked for an artist community that had an NSFW section we got weekly threats from PayPal compliance, I don't think sites like Patreon fare much better there. I don't see how this is special. Getting banned from PayPal is far, FAR away from "being shunned by all corporations".
Seems like PayPal had already cut off funding for Proud Boys over a year ago? The did the same for Antifa though, so at least they are somewhat consistent.
This particular article seems less about Proud Boys and more about Epik using an "alternative currency" called "Masterbucks"...
> The right wing has long accused tech companies of anti-conservative bias. Experts say the claims are unfounded.
It's an interesting situation. Facebook particularly I would say has an overwhelming conservative bias. At least, I saw an article the other day on how the top X trending posts on Facebook are always dominated by pro-conservative pieces. However, I've also seen a ton of anti-conservative partisan fact-checking on Facebook (i.e. it's obvious the factchecker was doing everything possible to label an unfavorable article as "false" or "partly false" on a small technicality). So in my opinion, the situation is that (in the case of Facebook), the userbase and content is right-leaning, while the fact-checkers/employees are left leaning and are trying to combat their own userbase.
Maybe not with centralized governance like Proud Boys, but PayPal definitely cut off payment processing for "Antifa Sacramento" and "Atlanta Antifascists" last year, I remember reading about it...
They have spokes people, a uniform, unified political beliefs, and meet through organised events.
I suspect the only reason they claim not to be an organisation is because they don't want to be label a terror organisation. Either way, how they choose to organise should be completely irrelevant here. If Antifa decided they were an organisation tomorrow and The Proud Boys put out a statement saying they're no longer an organisation should PayPal reverse their stance?
Your ideological sophistication is questionable. If you've ever spent time in left discourse you'd know that leftists argue about everything. And it's not just leftists who hate fascists. It's pretty much anybody with a basic understanding of the history of the last century.
Fascism wants to start up the murder machine; and they'll tell you that it's to "purify" the nation and they'll try to present it in such a way that you think it's only "bad, dirty, disgusting" people who will be fed into it. But in the end the murder-machine will be turned against anyone and everyone until it is stopped.
The scenarios that apply to this country look less like Europe in the 1930's and more like Syria with a side of Rwanda.
The problem with modern Antifa is that the definition of "fascist" is becoming so loose and so unhinged from historical context that it is meaningless.
For example, according to many activists claiming to be associated with Antifa, if one believes that trans-rights matters are not a major priority – compared, say, to class issues – that makes one a fascist. Think of the extreme leftists of May 1968, who were fighting against what they saw as insufficiently punished or even resurgent fascism. Since advocating for sexual minorities was not a central part of their struggle (even feminism or gay men’s issues were at the margins), we are supposed to assume that those anti-fascists were themselves fascist. That’s absurd.
> The problem with modern Antifa is that the definition of "fascist" is becoming so loose and so unhinged from historical context that it is meaningless.
No, they don't. As with many extreme movements, people calling themselves Antifa are a group of people of similar but nevertheless disparate outlooks, united through the principle of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend". Were Antifa to prevail over their ideological adversaries, one could expect them to then immediately descend into savage infighting, just like most other historical revolutions have.
Nor would a uniform mean that there is a united organization. Within the world of splintered Marxist parties, there is a long tradition of different groups maintaining the same aesthetic style, while nevertheless branding each other as heretical and not real communists.
The reason they are organized is such a dis-organized manner is b/c of the fbi and other state and federal agencys that have historically targeted the left.
Can't kill or imprison a groups leaders if it has 100's of heads.
They're an organization as much as any decentralized structure can be. Is Mastodon an "organization", and can said imaginary "Mastodon" organization, or Rochko and any contributors to the project anyway be held liable for the goings-on in individual instances that are meant to be autonomous by design?
> According to one letter, penned by Epik’s SVP of strategy and communications, Robert Davis, PayPal inquired about offshore accounts, money transmission licenses, and "other queries related to cross‐border activities and law enforcement."
> “[The questions] were absolutely absurd, and well outside of any knowledge or experience we have as a domain registrar,” said Davis.
These sound to me like things PayPal very obviously should be asking of anyone using them to run a cryptocurrency.
Interesting that they've taken down the masterbucks page now linked in the article and with the archived note about tax advantages, and moved it to masterbucks.com which their FAQ claims they control: https://www.epik.com/support/knowledgebase/using-masterbucks...