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Patreon Takes a Stand Against Hate

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Patreon logoHate speech is easy to define and recognize, despite what right-wing critics claim. If the speech seeks to rile violence against a group of people, either by belittling them or stripping them of their basic rights, then it’s hate speech. Saying a particular race should die? Hate speech. Saying women shouldn’t have equal rights? Hate speech. Saying trans women aren’t women? Hate speech. Calling for rolling back LGBTQ rights? Hate speech. Saying Muslims don’t have the equal right to practice their faith? Yes, for the love of whatever god, gods, or nothingness you believe in, that’s hate speech.

So when Patreon kicked a prominent anti-woman YouTuber off their platform for hate speech and using the N-word, similar right wing provocateurs, such as Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris willingly joined him in banishment.

Patreon took a stand against hate speech, setting what should be an example for Facebook and Twitter. Have they infringed upon free speech and will it pay off?

Patreon


Patreon is still a smaller service. Unless you engage with a lot of freelance or amateur content, you might not know about it. It’s popular with artists, YouTubers, podcasters, and other creators as a way of collecting donations in exchange for bonus content. I’ve considered using it myself for bonus content on this site. Users pay creators through Patreon, and gain access to backer-only content or rewards. Patreon takes 5% of donations.

Patreon is a way for creators to offer the bulk of their work for free, while still rewarding donations. The service has grown steadily over the past few years, and will likely continue to grow as more creators find a way to make money online. These days, everyone has a side hustle (you’re reading mine right now).

Banish Hate

Carl Benjamin, also known as Sargon of Akkad, was the first person Patreon banned from their crowdfunding service. He’s a misogynist YouTuber who regularly speaks out against women’s rights. He recently used homophobic and racist language—including the N-word—on YouTube. Patreon didn’t want money from him anymore. They froze his account.

Patreon is human curated. That means it wasn’t an algorithm that froze Benjamin’s account, but a person. Patreon has a simple policy for this, and it’s a rather human one. If the person with the frozen acocunt removes the offending content and posts a public apology, all is forgiven. It allows people to learn and correct bad behavior, rather than face a ban. Patreon believes this leads to better discussion, and history says they’re right.

However, Carl Benjamin was having none of that civil discourse stuff. He refused, and forcing Patreon to keep his account frozen. Milo Yiannopoulos, noted alt-right provocateur and self-aligned Proud Boys supporter, who has regularly used his rallies to target specific individuals with harassment, was removed from the service within a day of signing up based on his association with a criminal organization. The platform is no place for his misogyny, transphobia, and targeted harassment.

… and the Rest Will Follow

After Patreon froze one man’s account for racism and homophobia, and another man for transphobia, misogyny, targeted harassment, alt-right-based hate speech, and his criminal associations, Jordan Peterson, a man who denies having anything to do with misogyny, the alt-right, or hate speech, Sam Harris, a man with an Islamophobic podcast, Dave Rubin, a libertarian podcaster who believes the ideology isn’t inherently hateful, and others left the platform in a huff. These people, who all deny being hateful, bigots, misogynists, or problematic, all left because they believed their speech would be next. Somehow, all of these men who say they do not engage in hate speech were afraid Patreon would target them next for their hate speech.

“These recent expulsions seem more readily explained by political bias.”

– Sam Harris

These people, who conflate legitimate conservative and libertarian views with hate speech, have made themselves victims before Patreon even came after them. Jordan Peterson is a favorite of the “incel” movement and purveyor of ideas like “enforced monogamy,” that is, forceful pairing of women with men to stop men, who make up 99% of mass shooting perpetrators, from committing acts of violence. Still, he wasn’t banned, he removed himself from the platform.

“He was angry at God because women were rejecting him. … The cure for that is enforced monogamy. That’s actually why monogamy emerges.”

– Jordan Peterson

Shocking Self-Awareness

Perhaps platforms should ban these people for hate speech. However, their attacks on women and minorities have mostly been subtle. They effectively foster the same hate over time, but do so slowly as to avoid outright criticism. It’s a slow path to radicalization that doesn’t seem to be outright hate speech. But, truly, it is. Unfortunately, these services need to point to a specific post, video, or tweet for reasons behind a ban, and these provocateurs have been careful to hide such outbursts.

“It is time we admitted that we are not at war with ‘terrorism.’ We are at war with Islam. … The only reason Muslim fundamentalism is a threat to us is because the fundamentals of Islam are a threat to us. … The idea that Islam is a “peaceful religion hijacked by extremists” is a dangerous fantasy.”

-Sam Harris in an Islamophobic op-ed in The Washington Times (link in sources below)

By throwing their lot in with noted racists, homophones, misogynists, and harassers, Sam Harris, Jordan Peterson, and David Rubin have defined these ideologies as their own. Patreon and other platforms have given them surprising leeway, yet their persecution mentality shines through. These aren’t people who are defending well-meaning ideas, they’re defending privilege, hate speech, and oppression.

Is this a Good Thing?

If you ask those who can easily recognize hate speech when they see it, yes, removing hateful people, violent people, and criminals is a good thing. If you ask those who regularly engage in hate speech and are tired of people calling them nasty names like “Racist,” and “Bigot,” it’s terrible. After all, they’re the only ones allowed to call people names, and it’s free speech when they do it.

But let’s pretend this isn’t a power struggle, with the privileged clinging to their position because equality feels like oppression. Let’s try to see their side. They feel like Patreon is attacking them due to their beliefs. Could this be an intrusion into free speech? Could it be a slippery slope that leads to banning conservative viewpoints altogether, as they suggest?

Are We Banning Free Speech?

Let’s first examine the free speech argument. Does this get in the way of “free speech?” Technically, yes. But so do rules like “No shouting fire in a crowded theater,” “you can’t shout bomb on an airplane,” or “texting someone who’s suicidal to kill himself makes you culpable.” These are all laws or rulings that limit what you can say and when you can say it. These limits are in extreme cases only, when the speech in question could put the lives of others in danger. One’s right to free speech cannot be used to take away another person’s right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We’ve enforced these laws for over a century, and these exceptions on free speech have gone unchanged.

Hate speech has a specific goal: to demean and devalue a person. To get people to see a group of people as an “other” who does not deserve personship or the same rights and security as everyone else. When you devalue someone as a person, you increase their chance of being a victim of a hate crime dramatically. Hate speech directly correlates to violence, as we’ve seen from Facebook’s contribution to genocide in Myanmar and Facebook’s ability to influence hate crimes in Germany.

There is a direct and proven line between hate speech and hate crimes. So not only does hate speech ask people to impede someone’s civil liberties, it also influences others to commit hateful acts of violence. It is therefore in the same category as shouting fire in a crowded theater or texting a friend to kill themselves. It is speech to inspire violence, and therefore, not protected speech. This is nothing new.

So is it banning unfiltered, hypothetical free speech? Yes. Is Patreon banning protected speech, as in, free speech as guaranteed by the constitution? Absolutely not.

Increasing Free Speech

Banning hate speech actually increases the diversity of speech on a platform. Take 4chan, for example. 4chan has no moderation. It became a breeding ground for hate speech, the incel movement, racists, homophobes, and misogyny. As such, you’ll find few women, people of color, or gay people on the platform. They won’t express their thoughts for fear of harassment, doxxing, and real physical threats. Hate speech hampers their free speech.

And we find this on other platforms too, especially after Gamergate. On Twitter, women are afraid to speak up and use the platform to talk about feminism. Black women, especially, know the scorn they receive any time they speak out. As such, women are censored on the platform.

Refusing to address hate speech and harassment only helps those who hold the hateful views or wish to harass. It’s denying the majority a voice to appease the hateful few. You must choose to censor someone on your platform. Either you allow hate speech, censoring non-hateful people who do not wish to be associated with that hate and the targets of that hate speech, or you censor hate speech and harassment, and protect those who are not trying to incite violence.

The choice is clear. Protect decent people at the cost of the hateful and violent few. Banning hate speech increases the distribution of free speech. It allows free discussion and actual, reasonable discussion across the political divide to occur. By banning hate speech, we can foster actual discourse and people could work to heal the growing divide between conservatives and liberals.

Instead, women, people of color, LGBTQ people, and other more liberal groups are harassed off platforms. This grows the divide.

So is this a Good Thing?

Unequivocally yes. Banning hate speech increases diversity of thought and opinion, it protects people from harassment and violence, it defends civil liberties, and it’ll help us bridge the gap between conservative and liberal ideas. It’ll help us become a world where discourse and intelligible debate are once again, or perhaps for the first time, the norm. To the alt-right, nationalist, neo-Nazi critics of these rules? Don’t let the door hit you on the way out. The adults in the room want to talk.

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