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Dec. 8, 2018 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
29:05
You Cannot Trust Patreon (#PatreonPurge 1)
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So I woke up the other morning to thousands of messages from all my various friends and subscribers and whoever else on the internet.
I thought, oh blamy, that's odd.
And they were all talking about my Patreon.
So I went to check it and lo and behold, my Patreon wasn't there.
I thought, that was quite strange.
I've been on Patreon for, what, three or four years now?
And I've never had a problem.
And so I thought, well, I'd better email Jack Conte, the CEO of Patreon, because clearly there has been some kind of mistake.
I said, hi, Jack, sorry to bother you, but I woke up today to find my Patreon account had been removed.
I've not been provided with a reason why, and naturally I assume this is some kind of mistake, as I don't believe I have ever exhibited any manifest observable behaviour that would warrant this.
Would you be able to help me out please?
Thanks in advance and Merry Christmas, Carl Benjamin.
Now you might be thinking, manifest observable behaviour.
That's an odd phrase, but I've heard it before.
Where have I heard it?
And the place I heard it was when Jack Conte was justifying deplatforming Lauren Southern, despite the fact she had otherwise not violated their terms of service.
Patreon recently took down the pages of all the members of Defend Europe, including Lauren Southern's page, and we also took down the IGD news page as well.
Some people are really upset about this.
Some people have even accused Patreon of making decisions based on political ideology.
So I'd like to clear all that up right now.
Content policy and the decision to remove a creator page has absolutely nothing to do with politics and ideology and has everything to do with a concept called manifest observable behaviour.
The purpose of using manifest observable behaviour is to remove personal values and beliefs when the team is reviewing content.
It's a review method that's entirely based on observable facts.
What has a camera seen?
What has an audio device recorded?
It doesn't matter what your intentions are, your motivations, who you are, your identity, your ideology.
The trust and safety team only looks at manifest observable behaviour.
We get rigorous and specific because we're talking about removing a person's income.
The authority to take away a human being's income is a sobering responsibility.
So naturally I thought to myself, blime, what have I done?
I don't think I've done anything particularly exciting.
The only thing that has really happened to me is when I was attacked by Antifar, and that was quite some time ago, and everything I did was in self-defense, and I didn't even punch anyone.
So I couldn't see what I'd done to get myself deplatformed from Patreon.
Jack never replied to my email, but I was sent this by many of my patrons, where Patreon had replied to them when they asked what had happened to my Patreon account.
Hi there, thank you for reaching out.
This page was removed by a trust and safety team for violating our community guidelines.
At Patreon, we believe in freedom of speech, and we are creating a platform that empowers creators to share and debate ideas.
The creator in question used racial and homophobic slurs as insults in a conversation shared online.
As a result, that page has been removed from Patreon.
Naturally, I, a crusader against political correctness, thought, of course, but you're gonna have to be a little bit more specific than that.
But I mean, it probably is true.
I probably have used the naughty words.
Luckily for me, I received an email from Patreon a few hours later.
Hello, Carl, my name is Sydney, and I'm on the trust and safety team here at Patreon.
I want you to know that my team and I removed your creator page for violating our community guidelines around hate speech.
Patreon doesn't allow creators to use racial slurs as insults.
In a conversation posted on Michelle Caitlin's YouTube channel, you use language that we consider harmful and degrading.
For this reason, your Patreon creator page has been removed.
And I thought to myself, that's really interesting.
Because the conversation they're talking about happened 10 months ago, at the height of a full-on harassment campaign that was going on against me by, I guess, people we would broadly call alt-right trolls, who are organizing themselves on anonymous message boards.
I actually had to report this to the police because it got so bad.
I didn't really want to publicize it, because every time I talk about it, it just gets them more excited.
But thank you, Patreon, for forcing me to explain to everyone exactly what's going on here.
Here's the clip in question they're referring to from the live stream.
And I think that the context in which I use it is self-explanatory enough.
This is what I mean about the channel.
I just can't be bothered to deal with people who treat me like this.
It's really annoying.
Like, you are acting like a bunch of niggas.
Just so you know.
You act like white f ⁇ ers.
Exactly how you describe black people acting is the impression I get dealing with the alt-right.
Now you might say, well, that's very rude.
And of course you'd be right because that was precisely the point.
I was trying to use their own language against them and do what I can to hurt them because they were doing what they could to make my life an absolute misery.
Now, I don't really know why they're doing this, but I do know that the only reason that Patreon even knows about this obscure conversation that happened on a channel with roughly 4,000 subscribers is because this same harassment campaign, failing to previously hurt me on other occasions, have created a pastebin document with out-of-context clips of all of the quote-unquote offensive or non-politically correct things that I've said,
and have been sending it to every service provider that I use.
For example, at the moment, they're currently sending it to PayPal.
I'm sure that PayPal will capitulate to this Nazi harassment campaign as well.
But what's interesting is that Jack Conte said he wasn't going to capitulate to harassment campaigns, done by Nazis or otherwise.
And I think partly what a lot of your creators are fearing now is that mob rule, mob meaning a big group of people, but also this acronym here, will just sort of kick in.
That eventually the, that Lauren, although this may be completely within the lines of what you guys have set out, that it will just eventually get to a place where anyone who's doing anything, it'll just get kicked up enough and that you'll just be under pressure, sort of that the dam has broke already.
I think that's a big fear here.
No, I just completely disagree with that.
And anybody who's watching who's worried about that, yeah, we're just, it's a different system.
Your trust and safety team is currently making whoever these people are very, very happy.
And it's going to continue because now you've set yourself a bar that is ridiculously high.
To say that Patreon doesn't allow creators to use racial slurs as insults means that you now have to monitor everything all of your creators say.
And any of your creators could be reported for something that, like in this case, was done out of context.
But even more than that, as far as Patreon's own rules go, this rule applies to what is put on Patreon, as in on the platform itself.
This is quite explicit, and Jack Conte specifically referred to this in his interview with Dave Rubin.
But the point is there's this section of the content policy that specifically mandates like the things that you can do and can't do on Patreon the platform itself.
Not like on Twitter, but on Patreon the platform itself.
Given how specific the terms of service and Jack Conte himself have been on this subject, let's summarize what I actually did, or rather, what I actually didn't do.
One, this content was not on any of my YouTube channels.
This was a guest appearance I made on someone else's channel.
Two, my patrons did not fund me to go on Michelle Caitlin's live stream.
Three, this live stream was not posted to my Patreon account.
And four, you cannot be racist to Nazis.
So according to Patreon's terms of service and Jack Conte's own logic, Jack Conte and Patreon believe I did nothing wrong.
However, that's not the conclusion of the trust and safety team.
It turns out that Jack Conte, the CEO of Patreon, is either lying or he is wrong.
He does not know how the terms and conditions of his own platform works.
According to his trust and safety team, any post on any social media platform anywhere, no matter what the context, is actually not allowed on Patreon, if they perceive it to be a racial slur.
And I just want to stress, I don't consider calling a bunch of Nazis the N-word to be a racial slur.
I very much come from the Chris Rock school of thought on this regard.
It doesn't describe a skin colour or a race, it describes a set of behaviours.
But anyway, I thought, well, I'll email them back explaining the situation and asking to start the appeals process.
And I heard nothing back from them.
Given the high-profile nature of this case, I thought I might have expected a fairly prompt reply.
So I sent them another email an hour later.
Two hours with no word, and I decided to email both support and Jack to ask them just how I'm supposed to begin the appeal process if no one's going to respond to me.
But honestly, by this point, I kind of felt like I wasn't being dealt with in good faith.
But finally, the next day I received another email back from Sydney.
As I mentioned in my initial message, Patreon doesn't allow creators to use racial slurs as insults in content that they are funding on and through Patreon.
My team monitors our platform and the online presence of our creators to make sure that their content is within our community guidelines.
This is staggering, because now Patreon is saying that your entire online presence has to be within their community guidelines.
They are laying claim to all your online behavior or they will cut off your funds.
Of course, it doesn't say that in their community guidelines, and Jack Conte seems to believe the complete opposite.
But the point is there's this section of the content policy that specifically mandates like the things that you can do and can't do on Patreon the platform itself.
Not like on Twitter, but on Patreon the platform itself.
Not anymore according to your trust and safety team, Jack.
And I'm sure that you're as surprised to hear about this as I am.
So I replied, thank you for responding.
Before we start, I was not even aware this rule existed, as it does not appear to be on the community guidelines.
As far as I can tell, the community guidelines refer to content that is actually on Patreon.
And this content was not only never on Patreon, but not even on my channel, as in, I was not funded by patrons to be on this live stream.
In his interview with Dave Rubin, Jack Conte explicitly said, we don't care what you said on Twitter, with the natural implication that, on other social media platforms, Patreon is not the judge, and only judges what is on its own platform.
This seems like a common sense and level-headed interpretation of what he said.
There are further objections from me, but that seems like the obvious place to start, with the reference of their own guidelines on hate speech.
It's been almost a day since I sent that email, and I haven't received a response yet.
And to be honest with you, I'm not really expecting one, because this is not new for Patreon.
This is clearly part of a political campaign to de-platform opponents of political correctness.
That's why you have really clear spelled out content policy that's based on behavior, not on like ideology or other things like that.
Patreon tried to present themselves as an ideologically neutral platform.
But this is demonstrably not the case.
Their own hate speech policy describes the ideology they deliberately exclude.
They wouldn't allow the use of swastika for propaganda, and the content creator is not allowed to glorify a group that is known to support ideologies that would be classified as hate speech under their policy.
And the very concept of hate speech itself is in fact an ideological position to hold.
To translate the term hate speech into English, what they're effectively saying is that I have sinned.
And Patreon's ideological biases are very clear for everyone to see.
In 2015, Patreon sold out, gained $30 million in funding to support the growth of their platform.
Because prior to that, it was something like 20 guys in a warehouse.
And with this funding, Patreon could become a fully-fledged Silicon Valley tech giant.
In 2016, Patreon started making a name for itself as a place where independent content creators like myself could go and their fans could fund them through the site, preventing the need for me to do advertisements on my channel, Ben Shapiro style.
And by mid-2016, it was already being recognised that Patreon was being used for what the right-wingers called hipster welfare.
And by 2018, Stripe, PayPal, and Patreon were banning prominent right-wingers from their online fundraising platforms for reasons unknown, but it was always remarkably consistent that it was people who were considered to be right-wing that were the target of these deplatforming campaigns.
It's weird what Patreon finds itself on the opposite side to as well.
Now, you can argue the case whether you thought that Lauren Southern was right or wrong to actually take action to put her boats in between another boat and its destination.
But her intention, as I understand it, was to prevent people trafficking into Europe.
And then you've got the case of my friend Jeremy from a YouTube channel called The Quartering, where he was talking about the remarkable number of Magic the Gathering judges who have convictions for paedophilia.
Or Jihadwatch's Robert Spencer, who was banned from Patreon after being strong-armed by MasterCard.
But it seems now that Patreon's trust and safety team have actually fully taken over in this regard and are now steering the ship because they are now banning anything that seems to be a sin towards progressive ideology.
In the last few days, Martian magazine, an edgy right-wing comic strip, was banned, as well as myself, Milo Yiannopoulos, and a white nationalist called James Alsup, all banned within a few days of one another, and all banned for ideological reasons.
In Milo's case, he was banned for his quote association with the Proud Boys.
They're basically like a fraternity of constitutionalists.
They're not considered by the FBI to be some extremist hate group or anything, but Patreon is treating them as if they are.
But the political deplatforming never seems to affect left-wing groups, such as when one of the hosts of the famous left-wing podcast, The Chapo Trap House, encouraged all his listeners to kill themselves and everyone around them.
Democrats suck ass!
There is no hope in the modern next call.
Party system, kill yourself and kill everyone around you.
Well, what about this friendly fellow who's apparently creating gonzo journalism and sorceress wisdom to inspire insurrection?
Each dollar you send my way is a bullet into the chamber of a gun we're building, one that fires a massive 0.44 round at the heads of politicians and capitalists alike.
Nothing to worry about there, Jack.
I think it's obvious that I'm being deplatformed by the political persuasion of the trust and safety team at Patreon, not because of any harm done.
And I think that Jack Conte and the rest of the Silicon Valley CEOs are either in a complete agreement with this or too cowardly to challenge their own employees on it.
And so I would be very surprised if Patreon would actually pay attention to their own terms of service and the words of their own CEO and recognize that I have done nothing wrong and reinstate my accounts.
Given that I no longer see Patreon as being a trustworthy platform for online crowdfunding, I've decided to move my crowdfunding to Subscribestar, which is a Patreon alternative.
And they even have the Discord add-in that Patreon had.
So if you signed up as a patron, you'd get added and promoted in the Discord itself.
So if you'd like to support my work, you can do that.
And if you can't get into the Discord somehow, send me a message and I will set that up for you.
But I'll leave you with something that I found very interesting.
In two parts.
The first part is one very revealing explanation of the culture of the CEOs of Silicon Valley that Jack Conte explains to Dave Rubin in his chat on the Rubin Report.
And the second part that I'll just post directly afterwards is a speech by Apple's Tim Cook on the frankly messianic goal that Silicon Valley has for the rest of the world.
People are very transparent with each other.
There's a lot of sharing, a lot of discussion and dialogue.
CEOs are constantly helping each other out.
So I will frequently call up other CEOs and ask them questions.
And it's amazing.
It's so different than because right before this I was in the music industry for 10 years.
Like you are alone on an island in the music industry.
I felt isolated.
So I'd say like one of the main things about the culture is discussion.
So for that reason, I do not think I'm going to get a lot of hate from CEOs.
I think people will talk about this and it'll just be a, you know, it'll be something that people like discuss and share with each other.
Look, there's a lot of smart people that are thinking very, very hard about this and making good, thoughtful, rigorous, evidence-based decisions.
That's it.
I mean, at the end of the day, like, you know, it comes down to like, is this something that you, you know, is this something where you're just, you know, you can't see it, you can't agree, you can't trust, you assume people are bad, or is this something where you actually think like, look, people are working hard to try and make this really fair?
This year, we've seen the stubborn and constant evils of anti-Semitism, violence, and hate darken the streets of Pittsburgh and so many other places.
Yet at the same time, we see more and more people opening their eyes and rising to their feet and speaking out in defense of a society where we are all bound together by the values we have in common.
I was recently in Brussels where I heard a speech by an Irish writer named Maria Farrell.
Something she said has stuck with me.
Despair is unethical, she declared.
We have a duty to hope.
I'd simply add that if we feel moved by this hope, then we have a duty to heal the world.
Jonathan, you spoke very kindly about what we at Apple do to shape this better future.
But I want to say a bit about why we do it.
This may sound simple, but it's not said often enough.
Apple is a technology company, but we never forget that the devices we make are imagined by human minds, built by human hands, and are meant to improve human lives.
I sometimes say that I worry less about computers that think like people and more about people that think like computers without values or compassion, without concern for consequences.
And so we try to stay rooted and to keep our devices connected. to the humanity that makes us, us.
We do that in many ways.
One of the most important is how we honor a teaching that can be found in Judaism, but is shared across all faiths and traditions.
It's a lesson that was carried forward by the late Eli Wiesel.
May his memory be a blessing.
It's a lesson put into practice by America's Muslim community, who raised thousands for the victims of the Tree of Life killings.
Lo, Ta'amod, Aldam, Re'eka.
Do not be indifferent to the bloodshed of your fellow man.
Do not be indifferent.
This mandate moves us to speak up for immigrants and for those who seek opportunity in the United States.
We do it not only because their individual dignity, creativity, and ingenuity have the power to make this country an even better place, but because our own humanity commands us to welcome those who need welcome.
It moves us to speak up for the LGBTQ community, for those whose differences can make them a target for violence and scorn.
We do so not only because these unique and uncommon perspectives can open our eyes to new ways of thinking, but because our own dignity moves us to see the dignity in others.
Perhaps most importantly, it drives us not to be bystanders as hate tries to make its headquarters in the digital world.
At Apple, we believe that technology needs to have a clear point of view on this challenge.
There is no time to get tied up in knots.
That's why we only have one message for those who seek to push hate, division, and violence.
You have no place on our platforms.
You have no home here.
From the earliest days of iTunes to Apple Music today, we have always prohibited music with a message of white supremacy.
Why?
Because it's the right thing to do.
And as we showed this year, we won't give a platform to violent conspiracy theorists on the app store.
Why?
Because it's the right thing to do.
My friends, if we can't be clear on moral questions like these, then we've got big problems.
At Apple, we are not afraid to say that our values drive our curation decisions.
And why should we be?
Doing what's right, creating experiences free from violence and hate, experiences that empower creativity and new ideas, is what our customers want us to do.
Technology should be about human potential.
It should be about optimism.
And we believe the future should belong to those who use technology to build a better, more inclusive, and more hopeful world.
After all, history is full of examples of what can happen when those with power and those who ought to have good judgment instead look the other way.
I believe the most sacred thing that each of us is given is our judgment, our morality, our own innate desire to separate right from wrong.
Choosing to set that responsibility aside at a moment of trial is a sin.
We as individuals have the power to know and feel and act, and we ought to use it.
That's a lesson that Ruth Lansing knows well.
Ruth just turned 100 on November 13th.
She was recently interviewed by the BBC for a more solemn occasion, the 80th anniversary of Crystal Knott, an event she witnessed firsthand while visiting Dusseldorf around her 20th birthday.
She remembers the shattered windows, the fine china and furniture thrown into the streets, the businesses smashed, the curses of the mob.
At a moment when the struggle against hate has renewed importance, the BBC asked Ruth if she had something to say to the world to mark her 100th birthday.
Yes, I do have a message, she said.
We only have one life, so why not use it to make the world a better place?
You might know the phrase, Deus ex Machina, God from the machine.
For those who don't, it's an idea that started as a bit of an inside joke among the ancient Greek playwrights.
Basically, it's a critique of a bad habit.
These playwrights like to get their characters into impossibly perilous situations and then rescue them at the last minute by some miraculous twist in the story.
Often the actors were even physically hoisted out of danger by a crane or some other elaborate machine.
In other words, Deus ex machina is how the first movie critics accused the first directors of using special effects to cover up lazy screenwriting.
But this idea of God from the machine has stayed with us through the ages because it's so comforting.
Just when the world seems to be getting more dangerous, just when it seems like the challenges may be greater than our ability to solve them, it's reassuring to think that some technological marvel, some creation of our own hands, will solve the problem for us.
But what I admire so much about the ADL is that your entire history provides a lesson here.
If the machines we build are going to help us solve the world's problems, then the God part, that decency, mercy, and humanity is going to have to come from all of us.
After all, we only have one life, so why not use it to make the world a better place?
Thank you so much for this award, but more importantly, thank you for your work.
We stand on your shoulders.
We are inspired by your legacy.
We are honored to be your partners.
And we will never stop working to drive out fear with the hope of a better tomorrow.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
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