Look no further than the recent issue where Patreon competitor Subscribestar had payment processors Stripe and PayPal stop processing their payments for _political_ disagreements with the purported beneficiaries of the donations through the platform. PayPal said that it was actually one of the underlying payment processors, and it was suspected to be MasterCard.
That incident was the first time I've ever taken the need for alternative payment processors very seriously.
I’ve been told political campaigns focused on MC/Visa forced a policy change on Fetlife (specifically which kinks you’re allowed to admit to being into) a few years back.
I’m not into the kink which caused it (and I won’t repeat it here) but that left a bad taste in my mouth. IMO, people should be free to discuss what they’re into, even when it’s something much more harmful than the kink involved.
Stripe de-platformed us because their payment processor (Wells fucking Fargo, paragons of virtue) didn't like what we were selling, which was fantasy adult toys. They tried micromanaging the complaint, asking if we could remove "flesh colored" options, but we weren't going to get dragged down into that. Ridickulous.
Imagine the guidelines they must be following. Somewhere there must be a rule written down that was once debated by a committee of pious folk that literally states that flesh-coloured¹ sex toys are not okay (but purple is fine).
1: So that's what? Anything from deep charcoal black to a subtle off-white?
Yep, it also drove them to take payments primarily via an e-check service, which promptly got owned and a huge number of FL users had to deal with fraudulent charges.
The payment industry as a whole is in the stone age.. ignoring the antiquated technology behind it all there are still a ton of industry discussions about even allowing now-legal medical marijuana dispensaries and things like that to become customers. Given that it all goes back to Visa/MC/Banks I don't expect it to change much soon.
Curious, what does that mean "risky google"? If you're avoiding seeing some graphic images, that makes sense. If you're avoiding searching it because of implications for google's tracking profile about you and how it might then rebalance future searches, then that's a pretty upsetting reflection on google / tech status quo, and fairly on-topic here. We shouldn't be afraid to seek knowledge like from a library, because of analytics, y'know?
Why would we assume Apple would be no worse. Apple has a track record of disallowing all kinds of media that credit card companies have much less issue with. You're generally free to buy all kinds of things with your credit card that Apple disallows in their various terms of service.
SubscribeStar was composed almost entirely of people banned from Patreon for various reasons, including things like dropping n-bombs in videos and blocking search-and-rescue boats from saving migrants in the Mediterranean. It's not surprising that big, mainstream companies don't want to touch that with a ten foot pole.
Patreon has also banned various leftist sites for things like doxxing and posting instructions on how to commit terrorism, but that doesn't get as much attention for some reason.
> Patreon has also banned various leftist sites for things like doxxing and posting instructions on how to commit terrorism, but that doesn't get as much attention for some reason.
For left leaning people it takes doxxing and instructions on how to commit acts of mass violence to get banned.
For the opposite ends of the political spectrum people have been banned for months-old videos - not even on a channel that the banned person runs - in which someone uses a swear word to tell the alt-right that they "are acting like n_____s" (which I interpreted as a deliberate word choice to emphasize irony that the alt-right is behaving how they often portray and see African Americans. Sargon's explanation is roughly similar). Meanwhile there are plenty of people who use the same slur regularly, some even in the usernames of their social media profiles. There is zero doubt in my mind that Patreon decided to ban Sargon on the basis of his political views first, then searched for something to justify the ban.
> Legally speaking you're not allowed to insult anyone, wether as a n-word, nor as a nazi
This is absolutely false, at least in the US where Patreon is based. Out of curiosity where did you get the idea that insults are illegal (assuming you're talking about the Unites States)?
Libel is much more specific than just insults. Libel entails knowingly making false statements to harm someone's reputation. It's also much harder to prove than most people think.
Someone tried to sue for calling someone a Nazi but lost [1]. In this case the defendant claimed to have been presenting a hypothetical. I have not been able to find a successful defamation case due to someone being called a Nazi in the US. Not to mention it wouldn't affect calling a black person a n____r because such a statement is not factually incorrect (as the slur is a derogatory term for a black person).
> I am not alt right, I am not a nazi. I've been on @SubscribeStar since @Vice terminated my @Patreon account in May. I haven't even recovered from that hit to my income. I am tired of being acceptable collateral damage in your culture wars. You sacrifice your livelihood- not mine.
Sargon of Akkad told a group of white neo-nazis they were a bunch of "n-words," ironically, in the context of accusing them of having the same poor behavior they attempt to associate with black people. If you're familiar with the entire rest of his body of work, he is a vehement liberal in opposition of any such identity politics. He said this on somebody else's channel, not only off of Patreon, but off of his YouTube account altogether.
But all that being said, it's all irrelevant. Let's say he said the n-word maliciously and was a racist, is it the role of MasterCard to prevent that person from being able to pay for a burrito? To get a paycheck from their legal employment? Why can't the expectation be that MasterCard is neutral up until the point of legality? There is a really bad authoritarian trend on the left wing to go after absolutely every neutral cog in the machine. If Reddit doesn't ban /r/The_Donald, Reddit is right wing. If Twitter doesn't ban TERFs, Twitter is right wing. Now payments? Are we going to get mad at the government for letting Been Shapiro drive on their neutral roads?
Deciding 'whether to do business with someone or not' is one of the kinds of freedoms capitalism is supposed to protect.
Outside of a standard set of specific reasons for which it is agreed to be illegal to refuse business (race, sex, orientation etc..), no business is supposed to be able to be compelled -by the government- to associate or transact with another. Instead, boycotts are used by the public themselves (rather than via government strongarming) or by company-to-company action to persuade companies to adjust their behaviour to meet expectations of what is ethically appropriate.
In arrangement, the expectation is not that companies are 'neutral' but that they are sufficiently moderated by public will. This freedom not-to-transact is what allows things such as boycotts of Apartheid South Africa, boycotts of companies that abuse their workers or run sweatshops etc.
There are plenty of ways to rearrange things outside of a Capitalist model, but once you decide to have Capitalism but 'prevent boycotting on political grounds' you're basically suggesting that Capitalism ought to be stripped of one of its extremely few mechanisms for ethical feedback. The implications of that ought to scare you.
The one big issue you're ignoring here is that the effective monopolization of various industries is opening the door to governmental action without the necessity of law. Consider something like Visa and Mastercard both deciding to block donations to Wikileaks. Was this an organic action or was it the government aiming to attack perceived enemies by exerting their clout behind the scenes? It needn't be some grand or secretive action by the government either. Imagine a single individual, perhaps a senator or an influential former secretary of state, phones up Mastercard's chair and simply tells him they'd be quite grateful if Mastercard would cut transactions to Wikileaks. What are they going to do?
This is the big problem with both the massive scale of certain businesses, their extensive interweaving with government, and of course monopolization.
I do think that's a very important problem, and yes I agree it is more than likely the US Government was responsible for that. In cases like that I think the government should be dutybound to make its actions public. It's possible the govt announced it at the time, but if so then I am unaware.
Where did I say that it should become legally mandated that MasterCard associate with anybody? Not only do I not think capitalism does/should compel them to do that, I think that capitalism explicitly doesn't compel anybody to do anything.
What I'm asking is if we as a public really want our payment processors to be making these moral judgements? That doesn't mean I think they should be compelled to do anything, but I certainly think it's cause for concern, and call for an alternative that IS willing to behave as a neutral party. I don't want the noise of what is effectively a pipe to be making arbitrary political judgements when deciding what is allowed to pass through.
Now, publicly funded banks, that's a different question. I absolutely expect neutrality within what is legal from our government institutions.
> What I'm asking is if we as a public really want our payment processors to be making these moral judgements?
If this action was completely unprompted, sure, but I think we're talking about payment processors choosing not to associate with people who have already been the subject of boycotts on their previous platform.
A better example would be WikiLeaks which enjoyed a fair amount of public support at the time Visa etc declined to process their payments, as we have reasons to suspect that the pressure on Visa to do this may have been from the U.S. Government.
By contrast, there have already been numerous public protests against people hosted on the SubscribeStar platform.
Do you think that thieves and violent criminals should be allowed to exchange money for goods and services or is that a punishment you reserve for the worst of the worst, those who make offensive jokes?
> We need a post-office bank and payment processor, which will then be legally subject to the First Amendment.
Postal money orders already exists, and are exactly as expensive and inconvenient as you would expect.
The actual problem is KYC laws that require payment processors to do the job of the police and refuse service to customers under purposely vague corporate policies without due process, instead of having the police do that job and only have payment processing service denied with a court order and an opportunity to contest it under the law.
The thing is I don't expect the post office to be expensive and inconvenient. They work wonderfully in many countries for basic banking services to all residents.
What is awful is that I expect it to be inconvenient and awful in the US because there is this idea that anything the government does will inevitably be bad and then there are multiple political parties that try their hardest to make that idea come true when they get elected.
There's no reason for the system to not work in the US other than people trying to sabotage it to the detriment of large parts of the population so their personal tax burden is lower since they don't believe they ever will need the service.
There is a specific reason the US does everything poorly. The US is the EU.
The EU in general doesn't provide government services, the UK does, France does.
When you're already the size of a state, there are basically no more economies of scale to be had by doing something at the size of a union of states. Your fixed costs are already being amortized over something like a million people or more, so the variable costs already dominate and spreading the fixed costs over even more people is past the point of diminishing returns.
But it's not past the point of expanding overhead. So suppose you want to do this in the US -- have the Post Office compete with Mastercard. You propose the bill.
The banks hate it because it's them you're competing with, they have billions of dollars, but more importantly they're a major industry in some states (e.g. New York) which have large numbers of legislators. So they not only use those votes against your bill, they trade their legislators' votes on other bills to get more votes against your bill. Moreover, their legislators are the ones who care most about things like finance, so guess who is on the finance committee.
Then you have states like Virginia where the major industry is defense. They want to destroy privacy protections, because you can't get a lucrative government contract for hoovering up and data mining financial data if you're not allowed to hoover up and data mine financial data. Guess who is on the committees related to that sort of thing. And New York is all for that -- data mining financial data for private purposes is lucrative too, and that amendment also makes it harder to pass the bill they don't like.
Then you have states where the government itself is a major employer, and what they want is more government jobs for their people. So they don't want your program to be efficient, they want it to be labor intensive, which is the opposite. But then it costs more, charges higher fees, requires the users to fill out more forms to use it etc. You may also see private companies looking for the same thing, because they then sell a solution to it, as with Intuit opposing tax simplification.
And so it goes down the line, at each stage making the program worse and harder to pass, until it either dies in committee somewhere or gets passed as some horrifying abomination that makes things worse rather than better.
This isn't some individual proposing to make the bill worse on purpose to demonstrate the ineffectiveness of government, it's a structural issue that produces that outcome systemically.
Now you expect I'm going to suggest having the individual states do it. There are some states that aren't full of big banks or spooks or government bureaucrats, all we need is for one of them to do it. Which would work if they weren't subject to the same problematic federal laws as private enterprise is, created by the same problematic process, which is the reason the market isn't already taking care of this.
In order for the states to do things better, first the feds would have to stop standing on their feet.
Postal banking is awesome for a lot of reasons. For one, post offices are pretty evenly distributed throughout cities including in low-income neighborhoods where banks tend not to be. There's a lot of precedent including the UK (https://www.postoffice.co.uk/everydaybanking). I hadn't considered first-amendment though, very interesting.
As long as they aren't stopping other banking, I'd be happy to see the post office extended to offer banking services. Just like I can use FedEx for mail.
First guy that mentioned post office banks to me was a British expat who also said that the post office checking account was really useful when he was a starving student. He was about 1500 pounds overdrawn when he graduated and they were still cashing his checks.
Since then I've seen post office banking as a way for getting poorer people out from under the thumb of exploitative banks, credit card companies, and check cashing places. Consider as well why should the government give a cut of EBT's cards and unemployment transactions.
Well you kind of have that. It's called the central bank (Federal Reserve Bank in the U.S. case) that processes bank account transfers without any restrictions that would go against the First Amendment. The extra stuff that you get with private companies such as Visa, MasterCard and PayPal is just that -- extra.
I always assumed that cryptocurrencies is exactly how SubscribeStar has solved it for their audience (if you mean "people" in general, them most of them aren't wondering about anything because they don't consider it a problem to begin with, at least until something they care about gets consistently censored).
So I went and looked up their payment options. And sure enough, they have a page on that. Which has the following notice:
"In order to stay compliant with our strategic credit card processing partners' policies and due to recently tightened regulations on the cryptocurrency circulation for the US-based companies, we are going to halt all support for cryptocurrency payments on this site for the time being."
What is this all about? Are they saying that payment processors will refuse to work with organizations that accept cryptocurrency? But then how e.g. Coinbase works with credit cards?
It is quite a complex topic. For example there are credit card processing companies for cryptocurrency related companies, but they have very stricter customer onboarding processes and also higher fees. For many banks who target mainstream customers it is just easier to block all customers who deal with cryptocurrencies than to create specialized producst/risk management/compliance processes for them.
Cryptocurreny processing is expensive as hell. Not to mention very frustrating when the client finds that the crypto bought with 1000$ values $800 on the merchant /processor payment page.
I understand why banks don't want their credit cards used to buy cryptocurrency, and then deal with all the chargebacks. But in this case they're seemingly saying that they can't accept cryptocurrency for some service, because doing so prevents them from also accepting credit cards for that same service, where the service itself has nothing to do with either.
How so cryptocurrencies haven't solved anything? If someone has done a transaction with cryptocurrencies that brings value to him, isn't that solving something? Your claim is just very probably totally untrue - I think Bitcoin etc have been very useful for some small group of people for quite a long time already. However the adoption just isn't that big. Somehow people seem to think that cryptocurrencies have to replace the existing financial system to be useful. Meanwhile they can be just be used by 100 people worldwide and still be useful.
Cryptocurrencies accomplish nothing that wasn't already possible before, usually faster, cheaper and safer. Just because someone uses an alternative doesn't mean it's solving a problem, and in this case it's just creating more issues.
I have used Bitcoin to buy various things and used it as a savings instrument, I see that it has solved problems for me. Of course I could use other tools for that, but if you think Linux is superior that doesn't invalidate someones experience who is using Windows.
Generally there seems to be lots of people who don't use cryptocurrencies and think that they don't solve any problems - OK whatever, don't use them, but there are loads of people using cryptocurrencies for whatever and your opinions are not objective measure on their value.
Bitcoin allowed to accept donation for Wikileaks since 2011 when Visa and MC blocked them. (Nowadays they accept also more privacy preserving currencies like Monero or ZCash)
Bitcoin allows people in Venezuela to avoid wealth confiscation on the borders, either when they are running away or when they are sending money back home to family.
Bitcoin allows people in Iran to transact with outer world.
Bitcoin allows people in India to keep their wealth in face of demonetization.
There are many problems that Bitcoin solves for real people and real companies every day.
Just because you aren't one of them, doesn't mean they don't exists.
Underutilised? Modern CPUs are designed to be underutilised. Or more accurately, designed to be bursty. It isn't like they are executing NOPs at full speed. The heat they generate isn't free.
Paypal has been completely atrocious at this since its beginnings.
Many horror stories of project cancelled and companies closing because Paypal had decided to close their account.
Yes that scared me. Extreme activists can cut you off from access to payment processors. We are a relatively cashless society and you are potentially at the mercy of the mob to survive. The mob’s definition of a Nazi becomes broader every day. I truly believe the pendulum is swinging the other way however. Once corporations realize that, this should stop. 4 years ago the majority stood with the mob because they like me believed the mob had decent ideals but were overzealous. Every day more people discover that the mob are morons on a power trip and a sense of morality more infantile than good/evil children stories.
That incident was the first time I've ever taken the need for alternative payment processors very seriously.