Pay Platforms: Provider or Police?

What's this I've been hearing about Patreon? Since December last year, people have been leaving Patreon. Accounts have been closed, are being closed as I type this, and the rot does not appear to be stopping.

Patreon is a crowdfunding service that ties content creators and subscribers together to facilitate donations towards the content creators. And lately, Patreon has been behaving more like the Moral Police instead of the service it's purported to be.

Carl Benjamin, a content creator, got his account shut down just last month. The reason given? He was guilty of using some very offensive words... on YouTube. YouTube, not Patreon. On someone else's YouTube channel, not his own. In essence, he had supposedly violated the Community Guidelines on Hate Speech. An excerpt is below:

"Patreon connects creators to their patrons all over the world. We are a global platform built on promoting creativity, which makes us a very inclusive group. Therefore, there is no room on Patreon for hate speech such as calling for violence, exclusion, or segregation. Hate speech includes serious attacks, or even negative generalizations, of people based on their race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sex, gender, sexual orientation, age, disability or serious medical conditions."

However. When you take context into account - he was trying to illustrate via negative example why it's not OK to use those words - and then do a search of those words on Patreon itself, you get a ton of results where those very same words are used... and in the original context!

What gives, Patreon? When you can't even enforce your own rules consistently and professionally, you lose the right to be taken seriously.

To me, this is a symptom of a larger problem. Tech service providers are using their power to shove their own subjective moral code down the collective throats of their users. That's not a good thing. That's never a good thing. Remember what happened with CloudFlare back in 2017? CEO Matthew Prince, by his own admission, arbitrarily banned The Daily Stormer because they pissed him off. I'm shedding no tears for The Stormers. What concerned me, at the time, was the concept of due process and a properly thought out set of guidelines for such cases.

Wherein lies the difference between Matthew Prince and Jack Conte, CEO of Patreon. Prince had the class to admit that it wasn't the right thing to do. Conte merely doubled down, and is still trying to worm his way out of any admission of wrongdoing for Carl Benjamin's banning. Check out his response to journalist Tim Pool below.

"...we examine behaviors on and off Patreon, and you are correct to point out that there is language that makes it seem like only content on Patreon is reviewed, which is not a constraint that we apply for all categories of the guidelines… we need to make that clearer."

This is basically double-talk for: we have rules, and you need to trust us to enforce them when or if we see the need to. News for you, Conte... trust has to be earned and Patreon, as of now, is a long, long way away from that. It's really friggin' hard to trust folks who establish rules and then enforce those very same rules selectively, sometimes using different interpretations for different people!

There's a hilarious video clip on YouTube that pretty much sums up what's happening here. Though portraying Jack Conte as Hitler, no matter how much of a weasel I think he's being at the moment, seems a bit much. Still, it's funny as all heck. Enjoy!

Who cares about Carl Benjamin anyway?

Not me. I barely knew who he was before this whole saga started. Then I went to watch one of his videos (he's known as Sargon of Akkad on YouTube) and almost got put to sleep. This dude is boring.

But there are people who think he's trash and are glad he was de-platformed. Because they find his opinions repulsive, or some crap like that.

Just gonna say this - it doesn't matter who the victim is. It's a matter of principle. We need to break out of this childish mentality that bad things are good when done to bad people. If we accept objectively bad things when they happen to people we don't care for, then we can't complain when they happen to people we do care about.

If there is no consistency to your principles, you have no principles, period.

More exits!

Jordan Peterson and Dave Rubin have declared their intention to leave Patreon. Sam Harris has elected to take his business elsewhere. And these are just the big hitters. Who else has to leave before Patreon starts to wake up?

Let's be crystal-clear on something. Patreon is not a Free Speech platform, and therefore not obliged to avoid censorship. Patreon was completely within their legal rights in de-platforming whoever they wanted, with or without an explanation. Patreon can act as unprofessionally as they please as long as they don't break the law.

That does not make what Patreon did, either right or sensible. Tech service providers need to realize that they exist at the pleasure of their users, not the other way round. The moment they stop being credible, the moment people stop trusting them, they've lost. Patreon might have been one of the most popular and well-known crowdfunding services on the Internet. Well, they're still well-known now, albeit for the wrong reasons; one of them in a nutshell - they got too big for their goddamn britches.

The USA is engaged in a culture war right now, a war of clashing political ideologies. And that war has escalated. Now if somebody gets offended at your words, they don't just flame you online. They pressure people to take away your livelihood. That's intolerance taken to new, dangerous levels. What's the next logical step? Gunning people down because those people drew cartoons they didn't like?

In Conclusion

Tech service providers are supposed to provide a service within the boundaries of the law. They're not the enforcers of political ideology, nor should they ever aspire to be.

To be Conte-nued?
T___T