> After Cambridge University launched an online portal for students to anonymously report microaggressions, the Free Speech Union threatened legal action. The portal was ultimately removed.[11]
I guess they consider some kinds of speech more free than others.
I found this article less than persuasive as it was clearly written to arouse rather than inform or supply context.
>I guess they consider some kinds of speech more free than others.
False equivalency. Setting up a snitch website has little to do with speech and everything to do with administrative action.
Clearly, many people here don't understand jack about why free speech is important. They just parrot that phrase when they feel it advances their pet ideology, literally not understanding what it means. They treat it as if it's just some clever construct made up by "the other side". This is how we get persistent false equivalency between communication and disrupting communication.
Yeah, I've seen their supporters defend Corbyn and point out that malicious photoshops were spread to make it appear as though he was reading the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Definitely doesn't seem like an exclusively right wing organization.
That's quite a lot of loaded words, I hope you don't pull a muscle. Communication or disruption seems to depend very much on one's position in the communicative infrastructure; if efforts to challenge some prevailing orthodoxy are disproportionately penalized, then people are likely to seek other avenues.
Likewise, if people perceive themselves as significantly endangered by some forms of communication, they have an interest in disrupting it. One could counter that they should argue an alternative point of view, but this presupposes that all arguments are made and evaluated in good faith, and that all disputation is substantive in nature, without any use of rhetorical figures or exploitation of cognitive biases. As we know to our cost, this is often not the case.
Anyone who argues in favor of coercion over persuasion, in favor of PayPal suspending accounts and Stanford creating institutionalized snitching - anyone like that clearly considers themselves a part of the orthodoxy and believes all the coercion will flow the other way. For them free speech, indeed, poses a significant danger... of losing their power over others.
I question your premises, which treat quite disparate things as interchangeable and ignore temporality, and don't really address the previous points at all.
It's equally possible that people might want a channel for anonymous complaints because they don't feel comfortable or safe articulating their unhappiness over an issue in public - that is, they feel their own speech to be chilled, directly or indirectly.
Your argument seems to rely on the assumption that that can't be the case, based on events that have happened subsequently - as if the news from today about Paypal is necessarily a consequence of the Cambridge (not Stanford) litigation, when it might be in response to something else entirely; the substack author didn't bother to mention any recent controversies, perhaps assuming that her audience were already following the group's fortunes closely.
The reference links to a Telegraph article quoting an explanation:
>Toby Young, general secretary of the FSU, wrote to the vice-Chancellor claiming that the website and policy "proposed a system of policing speech and everyday interaction" which would be "inconsistent" with its duty to uphold free speech. He pointed out that section 43 of the Education Act 1986 requires universities to take reasonably practical steps to secure freedom of speech within the law for employees. "This policy, as you must be aware, would radically interfere with how your academics teach, argue with and learn from students, as well as how students interact with each other," Mr Young said. "It would mean academics and students were under constant threat of being reported and investigated for having committed some wholly innocent but perceived slight, which would inevitably have a chilling effect on interactions that, in a university, should be free and unguarded."
I don’t see this as some hypocritical indictment. I don’t think free speech organizations should be expected to treat all forms of speech equally and without qualification. Especially when we get to the point of actions, such as anonymously reporting people, being considered speech.
When I think of free speech the context is usually the freedom of discourse and the ability to say controversial things - rather than the demand for total and unrestricted liberty.
> Especially when we get to the point of actions, such as anonymously reporting people, being considered speech.
So are whistleblowers like Deep Throat ate people you believe shouldn't have right to report and publish material?
> When I think of free speech the context is usually the freedom of discourse and the ability to say controversial things - rather than the demand for total and unrestricted liberty.
You have it backwards. Your pursuing permission not freedom. To have the freedom to speak of controversial subjects speech you must first have the freedom to speak. Freedoms are unrestricted by their very nature.
While I'm not very knowledgeable of English Law, Cambridge University (and every other university in England) receives taxpayer funding. If keeping free speech on campus is a condition for such funding, then this isn't censorship, but a contractual matter between Cambridge and the English courts that Free Speech Union would like to have observed and enforced.
>”So are whistleblowers like Deep Throat ate people you believe shouldn't have right to report and publish material?”
That’s quite different from what I was getting at. I am pro free speech, which includes journalists like you’ve mentioned.
What I was getting at is, people can be pro “free speech” insomuch as wanting open dialogue of controversial or heretical topics while simultaneously finding some kinds of speech/actions chilling and opposing such things. And, they can do this without being considered fundamentally flawed hypocrites.
I’ll propose a hypothetical/analogy. Envision it is the 1950’s in America and I support the rights of communists to speak on college campuses. But I do not support a system to report suspected communist sympathizers to the House Un-American Activities Committee. It could be argued that I’m infringing on the speech rights of the McCarthyites. But in my mind this doesn’t mean I’m anti free speech, because I’m ultimately opposing something I believe has a chilling effect on speech.
What if the latter speech is exerting a chilling effect, perhaps by design? Anonymous reporting can be gamed or exploited, but it can also be an outlet for those who are scared of speaking openly because they might incur retaliation.
I think you mean 'implies' rather than 'infers'. I'm not a big fan of the 'microaggression' concept (which seems to be an analytical tool that's been prematurely operationalized), but it's not hard to conceive of a person in a position of academic or social authority who habitually dunks on some outgroup in such a way that its members are scared to complain openly.
I picked that example because I think it's notable that FSU didn't champion the idea of anonymous dissent and push for a more transparent but maximally inclusive solution; it seems they were OK with a particular kind of speech being shut down. Paypal's lack of transparency about why they're being rejected as customers is a bad thing, but then again Paypal is notorious for unilateralism and consumer hostility, as flea-market traders on eBay have long grumbled.
I might be more sympathetic if this were an org with a long and nuanced history of arguing for a general set of values like the EFF (with whom I don't agree on every topic, but whose independence and consistency are well established). However my first impression of the FSU is that it's a more partial organization than its branding suggests.
i would have you explain your sentence because it describes the concept of "reporting" as making an inference and i am no longer clear about how to interpret the words structurally
i tentatively take it to mean that you did the inference, and it's punishment by the university, but i am not sure, because the mechanism by which the university affects paypal is unclear
if anyone is watching
I got annoyed at transient downvotes on this
and i'm tired of getting annoyed at websites
so i'm burning 12395 internet points
and locking myself out of my account
and throwing away the password
No, university policies produce punishment or non-punishment. Reporting is speech. Would you prefer that they report publicly and drag people into the court of public opinion without an investigation instead? Isn't that Cancel Culture?
Pre-emptively characterizing certain sorts of communication as totalitarian without any exploration of its content or merits is one kind of rhetorical strategy.
I doubt they were objecting to the speech itself as much as the system that had apparently been set up to facilitate it. Or in other words, you say "university policies produce punishment or non-punishment" and it seems to me it was precisely those policies that they were objecting to.
As a queer person, the second someone gets "cancelled" and starts yelling about pedophiles, it almost always means that they are anti-queer.
What a surprise that this crew seems very much in this boat.
I'm not issuing judgement on if paypal is in the right here or not (although my knee jerk reaction is that they are not), but the age-old "they're pedophiles" canard is well past dog-whistling and into trainwhistling at this point.
I call it a fog horn. In this case, I'm not hearing anything though. It may be someone with dissenting viewpoints, however hateful-seeming, or outright illegal behavior. As with most touchy subjects, I find the best path forward is to openly discuss without shutting down voices. I believe no one needs to prove they're _not_ a bigot, but one does need to prove someone else _is_ a bigot. Even that is a WIP stance for me.
> As with most touchy subjects, I find the best path forward is to openly discuss without shutting down voices.
I try to follow this myself, but I do find myself giving exceptions to specific touchy subjects. For example, I don't understand how to approach a touchy subject where open discussion actually drives away people and therefore makes it an echo chamber.
For example if a gay person left a community because people were openly discussing whether or not gay people are pedophiles and advocating for the castration and torture of gay people, and that the advocating for castration and torture of gay people wasn't being shut down, I honestly think that's a totally reasonable behavior on behalf of the gay person. And I honestly would disagree that this created anything even remotely resembling a "forward path" direction.
But, in abstract, I still believe we should openly discuss touchy subject matters. I just find myself constantly running into actual application where I disagree that openly discussing a specific matter actually benefitted anyone, and found myself agreeing that the community would be healthier if specific topics of conversation were shut down.
_most_ touchy subjects. There is no absolute. For some reason, I cannot handle a person speaking about a woman's appearance in the negative in front of her, and it's because I _think_ I am feeling her pain. I have told people to leave my house immediately for things like that. N-bombs, etc. That makes me a hypocrite, but I'm not strong enough to handle certain topics. I, myself, have accidentally said bigoted things and someone of the relevant marginalized community explains to me why it's hateful to say that, and I am so thankful for their words.
I don't know the context; with that said, are you sure you heard "hateful" and not "hurtful"? Hate is contextually charged. I know it's lost a lot of its meaning, but as someone who had a parent for whom english was a second language, I was taught not to misuse words like "hate".
I think you may be overestimating human reasoning skills. I often don't even notice "arguments as soldiers"[0] in the moment, despite my interest in rationality, and that's a very easy way to get unrelated claims squished together like that.
[0] https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/arguments-as-soldiers a topic which I'm thinking about now because a few days ago I noticed half an hour too late that "you need to wear a mask while on public transport in Berlin" has shifted to the side effects of vaccines without me realising.
Agreed. When there’s active attempts to expose young kids to overtly sexual behavior, it’s the people yelling “over reaction” who I’m most suspicious of.
There are lines you don’t cross with kids. When people try to erase those lines it has to be called out.
> There's definitely something going on here that needs to be addressed.
I'm glad you agree that transphobia should be addressed!
> People aren't just making this connection for no reason.
Indeed, this rhetoric is being used for fear-mongering and scape-goating in order to distract from certain problems and/or manipulate people into voting for fascists.
That's not what this is at all, they don't give a damn about free speech. This is just a bunch of conspiracy crazies trying to push their views and complaining when nobody wants to be associated with them.
Try writing your own article and submit it to their site. They won't publish it unless it's some right wing conspiracy bullshit. That's their right, of course: it's their platform and they get to choose what gets published, and anything they don't agree with gets "cancelled" for anyone who wants to use that moronic term.
But then they try to turn around and get their own crap published on other, more credible platforms, because otherwise nobody will read it. And of course, these platforms, such as universities and newspapers have a reputation to protect, so they aren't going to publish a bunch of nonsense.
> I suppose there's an argument that twitter etc are effectively "common carriers" ... I'm not sure I buy it though.
On one side of the spectrum we have your private home. Obviously your having the ability to infringe on my freedom to speak in that very specific and limited venue doesn't seem to lead to any great societal ills.
On the other side of the spectrum we have a government owned public square. I think it's clear enough that any regulation of speech there including informal coercion not to speak is quite likely to lead to significant political and social problems. Limitations on government power mitigate a lot of this but certainly not all of it.
And then we have large corporate owned properties, both online and in the physical world, where the public is more or less permitted to gather but the regular protections don't apply. Presumably the problems caused by regulating speech are related to scale. So at what point should regulation apply?
The concept of a common carrier isn't new. Twitter hosts prominent politicians from multiple large countries. It seems obvious to me that they crossed that line some point even if I don't know precisely where it lies.
> It sounds like a bunch of folk > that are butthurt private venues don't want to listen to their racist, homophobic, or transphobic rhetoric.
Basically this.
Students Unions have the absolute right to refuse to platform people (and to oppose their platforming by the institution in which they operate), if those people being given a platform runs contrary to the wishes of the student body the Union represents.
Nobody has a right to anyone else's platform. Making people platform your views is coerced speech.
Is GabPay associated with Gab, cause if so then no they don't. They blocked me for posting liberal viewpoints. They care about protecting right-wing racism and promoting domestic terrorism.
PayPal has been blocking people, businesses, and organisations due to real or perceived ideological wrongthink for years. This is why more businesses are waking up and changing to Asian payment processors.
The major credit card companies are just as bad, if not worse. Payment processors are one of the major systems that need to be treated as a utility. They've become far too comfortable using their position to enforce ideology.
Which T&Cs did PayPal say they broke? Is that why being a skeptic and asking questions no matter what political bias / spectrum you're on gets you banned as well? [0] The same also done by the opposing side too? [1] So, due to Flipper having their funds seized by PayPal for no reason means that they are a scam despite successfully shipping their product? [2]
It seems that you being a PayPal apologist without having a clue yourself being able to mention what T&Cs all those examples broke, essentially proves my point as to how PayPal can do this arbitrarily to anyone for no reason and they don't care if your business or non-profit dies.
Some of these cases seem like plain censorship. Other cases seem like something equivalent to the 10% rejection policy many US American insurance companies have, where they will flat out reject valid insurance claims just to raise the profit margins.
Personally I would never dare putting anything but spare change in the hands of Paypal or other US American payment providers.
I’m familiar with insurance practices but have never encountered a 10% policy.
I’d claim instead that there is error on the side of closing too much as contract language is rather clear and legal fees would likely exceed the value of smaller claims.
It was a few years ago and I can't find the source anymore, but it was an interview with an ex. executive at one of the large insurance companies who literally quoted the 10% figure and policy.
It may be different or non-existant at other companies.
Although the original article is tangential, my bigger concern is that there is no explanation why. I find it abhorrent to 'punish' someone without telling them why they are punished, even if it is a contractual agreement that is broken or enforced.
Some have noted that they broke the T&C, but as per this article we do not know this. We can conjecture, but there is little indication to this until PayPal confirms if and which T&C was broken. We have ample examples where accounts are suspended or closed without breaking T&C.
My other concern is the comments regarding 'private venues'. Indeed PayPal is, in general a private venue, but at what point does such a private venue become an agent of the (whichever) Government? We also have examples where essential resources to function in the cyber space were contacted by Government entities and suggested, cajoled, threatened, or outright told how to deny such resources to counter-Goverment entities.
And, for those who think 'good, the bad people are gone', I say yes, today your 'bad people' are gone. Tomorrow, when the Government flips (and it always does) to your 'wrong side', you are the 'bad people'. Suddenly 'you are' the one denied. Ample evidence to this in history.
> I find it abhorrent to 'punish' someone without telling them why they are punished, even if it is a contractual agreement that is broken or enforced.
When someone breaks the terms of service of a company, the company doesn't want to, and has the right not to, have to respond to sealioning from the offending party about which rule, down to the jot and tittle, was broken in what way, and whether that really counts as an infraction of the rule.
Just like the Kiwi Farms thing -- if you foment hate, particularly hate against protected groups like LGBTQ -- that may be legal in your jurisdiction. But you still shouldn't expect legitimate businesses to continue doing business with you. This is how society works now. Free speech does not mean freedom from consequences, and it does not mean that businesses run by decent people have to brook the toxic slime you spread.
While my personal opinion of the FSU's founder is so negative as to be unrepeatable in polite society, I regard certain categories of business (loosely speaking "infrastructure", but the boundary is vague even in my head) as being the kind of thing that must be available to everyone by default and only allowed to reject customers/users in very limited and well defined cases (think "court order" not "T&C says we can do it for any reason").
I regard the larger payment provision services, PayPal included, to be infrastructure.
The issue I have here is that a company is restricting access to the financial assets of another entity (which could just as easily be you or me) without any form of judicial oversight.
This is nightmarishly dystopian, since you and only you should have the final say on where your funds are parked and how they are used.
If anyone thinks this is normal or acceptable, they have been badly gaslit by the 1% who continue to leverage their power to parasitize the 99%.
Well they're keeping this UK citizen's account open without explanation, so the accountants are happy I suppose?
(An account I didn't knowingly consent to open. An account which they want more PII to close than they currently have (provided by me anyway) on file.)
When there's no explanation, it's almost always because of 2 reasons:
1. Sanctions.
2. Financial crimes. Think "funding terrorist-equivalent groups" or "money laundering". Now a terrorist-equivalent group is open to an interpretation by PayPal itself.. the same way we yell at facebook/twitter to be the decider of truth.
For these 2 reasons, employees are not allowed to notify the company what the reason is. Doing so would result in jail time for the employees. This rule is imposed by US government.
It's no surprise employees "overdo" the ban. Employees get paid the same whether they decide to ban a company or not. If they ban a company wrongly, big deal.. nothing happens (of course, unless they ban 100000 companies wrongly, but nobody would reach that number). If they make a mistake and don't ban a bad company, they (the employees themselves) could go to jail. Guess which side the employee would be biased toward.
> I suspect it’s because it often publishes sceptical pieces about the five sacred nostrums you’re not allowed to dissent from: the view that sex, like gender, is a social construct and therefore not binary and immutable; that the lockdown policy and associated Covid restrictions were a prudent response to the pandemic; the mRNA vaccines are safe and efficacious; we’re in the midst of a ‘climate emergency’ and the only solution is to achieve ‘net zero’ by 2050 (preferably earlier); and the West should continue to supply arms and aid to Ukraine.
How did these five things end up being part of the same tribe? How is it that, like, "don't take the Moderna vaccine" is on the same page as "stop helping Ukraine?"
they all involve fairly large groups of people lambasting and berating people who don't subscribe to the same journals et ideas as one or more of them.
To be a bit hyperbolic, it's thought-crime - controlling narrative and therefore policies and ideas. I understand that there's roughly countably infinite information available from sources online and offline. Open discussion should be encouraged, and bad actors should be warned, given a timeout, or perma-banned, depending on the severity and incident count. It is possible that a lot of people are unable to cope with any exposure to dissent or hate (or "climate denial" or...)
mastodon/GNU Social et al have a lot of really disturbing imagery and outright harmful or hateful speech - i can only assume that people are giggling behind their screens and servers. I just maintain both an individual and domain blacklist, my fediverse server just won't accept connections from the domains, and i won't ever see replies/posts from individual blocks.
If i wanted to allow other people on to my fediverse instance, you bet i'd really ratchet down on the censorship, to ensure that new users aren't bombarded with the sorts of things discussed in both of the HN threads. The timeline does move quickly, though, and if i got booted off my hosting provider over something that appeared on one of my subdomains related to fediverse, i'd be fairly upset, too.
I think PayPal has been hacked and they don't know the extent of it yet and don't want to publicly comment. An intruder with an agenda could have closed those accounts. I say they've been hacked after I closed my account due to phishing attempts from their domain.
PayPal is no longer deserving of the benefit of the doubt. This isn't the work of some shadowy hacker, this is their policy. They've been doing this shit for years. No due process, no way for victims to appeal. It's their long time MO.
I don't know why anyone would use PayPal knowing their history of user hostility. If you must use PayPal, then just use it for money transit and withdraw daily, but leaving funds on PayPal is just asking to lose them.
