Patreon Bars Anti-Feminist for Racist Speech, Inciting Revolt
I&#x27;m torn about this.<p>On the one hand, Patreon shouldn&#x27;t have to do business with people they don&#x27;t like. On the other hand, at what point do we accept that we have different viewpoints and live and let live?<p>The biggest one for me in recent history was Cloudflare arbitrarily deciding to stop hosting the Daily Stormer. Sure, DS is vile, but at the point we start enforcing censorship on a whim instead of hardened policies that aren&#x27;t selectively enforced, I think it becomes worrisome.<p>I guess I don&#x27;t have a problem with people deciding what messages they do and do not want to support, as much as I have a larger problem with the rest of the world handing them the reigns.<p>Centralization is the real evil, here. Why are we giving companies and people the right to silence vast amounts of voices and opinions on random whims?<p>Then you see counter-arguments, like &quot;well if you don&#x27;t want to get banned, don&#x27;t say bad things!&quot; But then, who decides what&#x27;s bad? The societal norms are shifting to a place where there are certain topics that <i>are not allowed to be discussed at all</i> even if looking at them from a critical lens. So, there are problems that people have, and things that need to be talked about, but they aren&#x27;t allowed to say anything about it. They can only reference the idea from some distant euphemism.<p>The ones that do use their voices are banished to the shadows where, not only do they not <i>stop</i> thinking and saying what they were before, but now they dig their heels in further. They spread out to forums that <i>will</i> have them, and incidentally tend to allow hate speech or inciting violence. So we&#x27;re taking the ideas we do not find palatable and sending them off to a distant land where the other bad ideas go to twist and tear and fester and rot.<p>To me, personally and anecdotally, this seems to be happening with increasing velocity. We&#x27;re tightening our grip on what speech is acceptable and using centralized services to force this control on ourselves, over a platform that has always been about the open exchange of ideas.<p>So what do we do? I don&#x27;t know. Privately-owned services should be free to censor. People should also continue to speak freely (if legal). I certainly think Net Neutrality is essential at this point, whether enforced via public infrastructure or some kind of over-arching regulation. But, there&#x27;s not much anyone can do in the current framework of things other than encourage decentralization. And I do, when I can.<p>Also, for the record, I&#x27;m a feminist, left-leaning socialist. So good luck writing me off as another conservative windbag who doesn&#x27;t understand the first amendment that&#x27;s crowing about censorship. I think censorship is a problem, whether it&#x27;s via private platforms or not.