Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin - Patreon Double Down (#PatreonPurge 4)

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Dec. 19, 2018 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin

21:21

Patreon Double Down (#PatreonPurge 4)

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	So the Patreon debacle continues and I'll assume you've watched the previous videos leading up to this one.
	If not, I will link them in the description and I recommend watching them first.
	The past two days have been a flurry of activity and I shall try to distill that down into the salient events, as this seems to be a rather important precedent.
	Following my sudden deplatforming from Patreon, many people from the so-called intellectual dark web have spoken up in my defence and in criticism of Patreon's actions as it appears to be demonstrably counter to their own terms of service and community guidelines.
	But before we get into that, let me explain how I see myself and this situation.
	I'm an activist for English liberalism, and I use that term to specifically delineate what I believe from French liberalism, socialism and fascism.
	Where Rousseau believed that man should be forced to be free, I disagree, and instead I side with John Locke, who believed that liberty consists of being free from any superior power.
	I think that liberty is the absence of coercion, and it is from this absolute that I proceed with my negotiation with politics.
	English liberalism is individualistic, whereas French liberalism, socialism, and fascism are collectivist.
	English liberalism puts the individual above the group and continental philosophies put the group above the individual.
	English liberalism proposes that there is no greater good, and that all should be done for the common good along a universal set of rules that can be clearly understood.
	Naturally, this individualistic set of beliefs would consider discrimination along arbitrary characteristics to be foolish at best and malevolent at worst.
	Each person should be judged as an individual or when as part of a self-associated group with a common purpose.
	This leaves no room for racism, sexism or any other prejudice against the individual because prejudicial beliefs are built on stereotypes that are not universally true.
	Not only is it immoral to erase a person's agency by judging them on characteristics over which one has no control, the judgment one makes is liable to be erroneous, because the stereotype may not apply to the individual in question.
	This makes racism not only a moral wrong, but also factually inaccurate.
	This is my sincerely held belief on the matter, and this opinion has not changed in the five years that I have been running my online public presence.
	In fact, it makes racism kind of a joke.
	Only an idiot would actually consider a worldview that was racially prejudicial to be a sensible one, and anyone who does so should be ridiculed.
	It is, in fact, the fundamental crux of my opposition to the left, which seems to have allowed its most radical and racist elements to proliferate a Marxist conception that black people are oppressed by their white superiors, a framework that I believe not only to be not reflective of reality, but laughably bigoted in and of itself.
	In fact, it's worth mocking, appropriating, and belittling the power of racists to disarm them of their ability to cause mayhem with a single word.
	A power that the politically correct seem to be intent on shoring up for them by closely policing the activity of non-racists in a futile attempt to eradicate racism altogether.
	Because therein lies the problem.
	Racism is not an act, it is an opinion.
	There are many racists on social media platforms who are sensible enough to not manifest any observably racist behaviour.
	In other words, these racists do not act racist.
	But despite this, one would not say that they are not racists.
	By the same token, there are many non-racists on social media platforms who do manifest observable behavior that could, if taken out of context, appear to be racist.
	Even if those pursuing the course of social justice could establish such totalitarian control that they could eliminate every single example of an offensive word, that does not mean that they have eradicated racism.
	All they have done is prevent its expression.
	The ideas have not gone away, and I believe that those that hold them will be filled with resentment at the loss of their liberty, which will ensure that these ideas will fester and spread out of sight with even more vigor than before.
	After all, there will be no one pushing back against them.
	So why do I tell you all of this?
	Well, it's because I'm an activist for English liberalism.
	It is my job to spread these ideas through the wider culture and to do what I must to expose the contradictions around which opposition to the status quo will rally in order for the status quo to change itself accordingly before these things become a problem that cannot otherwise be solved with words.
	This is, I believe, the best way to avoid what appears to be an ever-widening chasm between two different sides in a civil war between the regular folk and what I guess we could describe as the technocracy.
	Look, there's a lot of smart people that are thinking very, very hard about this and making good, thoughtful, rigorous, evidence-based decisions.
	A technocracy that seems to be mismanaging society.
	I have always been opposed to political correctness on this basis.
	I don't believe that it's up to progressive technocrats of the world to try and police people's interactions with one another.
	Not only do I think that they don't have the moral authority to justify it, I don't believe they have the capacity to do it with any competence and will instead proceed to hurt innocent people along the way.
	One example of how Patreon's policies have already done this is a Chinese engineering vlogger called Naomi Wu, who goes by the alias SexyCyborg.
	As you know, earlier this year, Wise Magazine had their lawyers pressured Patreon to remove my account.
	This shot down my YouTube channel for two months while I struggled to get a new funding source.
	Last May, I started using Subscribestar.
	Back then there was only one or two other creators on the side, just cosplayers.
	For the past few months, I have struggled to get back on my feet.
	My income is still half of what it was before Vice came to China, broke a written agreement and put me in danger.
	They never have to answer for that.
	Only me.
	It's been quite difficult.
	This week, some people who say things that other people don't like came to my founding platform, Subscribestar.
	Now, those offended people want to take away my livelihood.
	They want to stop Subscribestar from funding anyone.
	I'm supposed to be sacrificed for their politics?
	Again?
	For their fight?
	I'm just a girl in China.
	Why me?
	Why not sacrifice their income if they feel so strongly?
	Why are they doing this?
	Supposedly to save people like me.
	It makes no sense.
	She used Patreon to fund her successful engineering YouTube channel until she did an interview with Vice magazine and got into some kind of argument over the extent of the information that Vice was willing to print.
	It was alleged that Wu doxed the Vice reporter and then Patreon responded by suspending her Patreon account.
	And this seems to have stemmed from some kind of cultural confusion between China and the United States.
	But irrespective of this, Patreon did not give her any warning or method of restitution.
	Wu decided to simply move on from Patreon to a competitor called Subscribestar.
	And now, after the kind of alt-media sphere has gone over there, PayPal have pulled out of subscribestaff for what appeared to be political reasons.
	On the 16th of December, presumably after seeing what Patreon had done to my account and how it had been removed, though none of the terms of service had been breached, new atheist horseman Sam Harris announced he was closing his Patreon account in protest at Patreon's refusal to follow their own terms of service and instead be left to, as he said, the whims of the Trust and Safety Committee.
	The same day, Dave Rubin and Jordan Peterson released a video in which they explained that they are going to create a competitor to Patreon that Silicon Valley, as in PayPal, which is located in Silicon Valley, cannot simply shut down.
	It seems that following this, both Rubin and Peterson are likely going to follow Sam Harris's lead.
	Of course, you know, Jordan, who's working harder than anyone on the face of the planet, somehow you managed to also partly build a platform over the course of the past year in the middle of all of that.
	We knew that this, we knew that this was lurking in the background and that this was going to be a problem.
	And Dave, you've spent lots of time talking to investors and developers about building alternatives to these platforms that seem to be willing to throw their weight around in an increasingly arbitrary manner.
	But it's not like it's a simple thing to do.
	People want somebody to say enough is enough.
	And I mentioned this in a live stream I did the other day, but you know, I've watched my Patreon drop.
	We've lost around 600 patrons, I think about 5,000 bucks a month.
	But in a weird way, I've actually been inspired by it because I'm watching people stand up for themselves.
	So it's like on one hand, people are emailing me and they're saying I'm dropping my patronage and I'm really pissed and it's not about you and I want to support you.
	And on the other hand, my business side is going, that's not great.
	But we will solve this thing.
	I feel the same way.
	I've lost 1,000 subscribers and I feel exactly the same way.
	It's like, well, they're telling Patreon to go to hell.
	And, you know, it's not so good for me on the financial front, although that's not too big a catastrophe at the moment.
	They're taking the right stand and encouraging us, let's say, or encouraging someone to do something about this.
	Sam Harris owned the 13th largest Patreon account with somewhere in the realm of 9,000 patrons.
	Other members of the intellectual dark web followed suit and what seems to have been quite a significant number of patrons did the same, as a widespread drop in earnings was reported by content creators.
	Patreon's other top creators, such as detective podcast Sword and Scale, have voiced their concerns about Patreon being run by authoritarians.
	The next day, the Patreon trust and safety team broke their silence and publicly responded to what's happened since my deplatforming.
	They had previously responded privately to creators such as YouTuber Matt Christiansen, as he revealed when Patreon sent him an email to comment on my removal and to reassure him that no such fate awaited his Patreon account.
	Patreon also phoned independent journalist Tim Poole, who had been corresponding with Jack Conte, to try and answer his questions.
	On his own YouTube channel, Tim Poole pointed out that he was unsatisfied with what Patreon's representative had said, as they'd failed to give any concrete answers.
	I asked them to explain why other high-profile podcasts who have done far worse are able to stay up.
	And they said, I kid you not, we can't comment on other people's accounts.
	And I said, you're talking to me about someone else's account right now.
	You literally called me to talk to me about why you banned Sargon.
	And then you're telling me you won't comment on other people that you won't ban even though they broke the rules.
	There's a problem there, you see.
	It's not about whether or not what Sargon did is wrong or whether or not they should ban him.
	It's about the fact that we don't know what we're supposed to be doing.
	Sydney from the Trust and Safety team had also reassured me privately by email that Patreon do not comment on the removal of other creators, but here they are doing precisely that.
	Patreon's public statement on my deplatforming was written by Jacqueline Hart, the apparent head of the Trust and Safety team.
	Nick Monroe looked into her LinkedIn history, before it was deleted apparently, and found that before working for Patreon, she had previously been the director of fraud for gambling firm Paddy Power Betfair, a board member of the Merchant Risk Council, a board member of the G2 European Client Advisory Board, the Global Head Risk and Fraud at Ingenico ePayments, the manager of risk assessment at TSYS Merchant Solutions,
	and the Risk Operations Merchant Support Manager for PayPal.
	Jacqueline Hart is a corporate e-commerce expert, and she is apparently at the head of the trust and safety team on Patreon.
	This was the response that she gave to this scandal.
	Some creators and patrons have questions regarding our removal of Sargon of Acad for hate speech.
	We take a strong stance against hate speech and want to make sure that everyone has the full context regarding this removal.
	Before getting into the specifics, I'd like to warn you there is some inflammatory language.
	In the interview on another creator's YouTube channel, Sargon said the following.
	And that's it.
	Regarding the context of the situation apparently, no mention of the alt-right harassment campaign against me, other than my own words, no mention that I was talking to white nationalists, no mention that I am obviously being flippant and rhetorical in my use of what I accept is deliberately inflammatory language.
	But instead of providing any of this context, Jacqueline decides to omit it and just continue as if I were having a conversation with a group of black students or something.
	I realize I am probably guilty of existing under several layers of irony, but I really do not think that this is impenetrable.
	She continues with, Some people worry that we are reviewing content not posted on Patreon.
	As a funding platform, we don't host much content, but we help fund creations across the internet.
	As a result, we've reviewed creations posted on other platforms that are funded through Patreon.
	Sargon is well known for his collaborations with other creators, and so we apply our community guidelines to those collaborations, including this interview.
	This is not stated in the terms of service or community guidelines, so how is one to know this in advance?
	How am I to know that Patreon are apparently watching my every move like a hawk when their community guidelines explicitly say the content must be on Patreon?
	And when they say, well, we don't allow this content on Patreon, they mean except for all the times that they do allow it.
	Revolutionary communist groups fund their impending violent acts through Patreon.
	A simple search for the forbidden word on Patreon reveals nine pages of search results that feature it.
	But Jacqueline continues with, In our community guidelines, we state that we don't allow hate speech.
	Part of how we define hate speech in these policies is, hate speech includes serious attacks or even negative generalizations of people based on their race and sexual orientation.
	We also say, when reviewing an account for a potential hate speech violation, we consider some of the following questions.
	Is the creator using racial slurs or negative depictions of a protected class?
	In this case, Sargon used racial slurs to insult others and specifically linked those slurs with negative generalizations of behaviour, in contrast to how people of other races act.
	He also used a slur related to sexual orientation to generally insult others.
	That's all fascinating, but I don't consider ironically appropriating the insults that Nazis use to insult them in return to be a negative generalization about black people or gays.
	I believe it to be a kind of description of behaviour that was being exhibited by the alt-right at the time.
	So in my opinion, it's perfectly fair game to use these insults against them.
	But after omitting the context and deciding that it's Patreon's job to police the content of other platforms, Jacqueline concludes that, taken in whole with all of the context, this violates our community guidelines.
	Not one part of that statement is true.
	She is not taking this as a whole.
	She is deliberately omitting the context, which shows that I am not using these terms in a derogatory way against black or gay people.
	And we know from having read them ourselves that I haven't actually violated the community guidelines, because the content was not on their platform.
	Either way though, Jacqueline finishes with, We understand some people don't believe in the concept of hate speech and don't agree with Patreon removing creators on the grounds of violating our community guidelines for hate speech.
	We have a different view.
	Patreon does not and will not condone hate speech in any of its forms.
	We stand by our policies against hate speech.
	We believe it's essential for Patreon to have strong policies against hate speech to build a safe community for our creators and their patrons.
	I have yet to see anyone advance the argument that Patreon should not enforce its own terms and conditions on its website.
	It seems that most people are saying that Patreon shouldn't be enforcing its terms and conditions on other websites, as that comes across as distinctly Orwellian.
	If you wish to build a safe community for your creators and patrons, then perhaps you should start with the hate speech that is actually on Patreon.
	And it might be better to remember that I was actively in the front lines, so to speak, of the fight against the alt-right on an ideological basis, which is why I was being subjected to such awful treatment.
	Perhaps not being quite so bureaucratic and being a bit more human about my methods would be more appropriate?
	Because ultimately, it's not like the rules matter to Patreon anyway, is it?
	Apparently, in his conversation with Tim Poole, Patreon CEO Jack Conte simply admitted that, quote, 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.
	So point taken, we need to make that clearer.
	This is an admission from Jack Conte, that Patreon's guidelines, as written, do not cover hate speech that takes place off of Patreon, under a reasonable interpretation, and one that Jack reinforced himself 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.
	As far as a reasonable person would read from their terms and conditions, Jack is admitting that I did nothing wrong and that they need to fix the guidelines to make sure it is actually clear that Patreon is watching all of your online activities to ensure that your behavior is compliant.
	Jack knew this wasn't obvious.
	Jack knew that there was no reason that I should have thought that something I would say off of Patreon would need to be compliant with their hate speech guidelines and would be reacted to in this way.
	Instead of taking a sensible approach and dealing with this in a reasonable way, Patreon instead decided to go for the nuclear option.
	Did I get a warning?
	Did I get an email?
	A phone call?
	A chance to explain myself?
	A chance maybe to make amends?
	No.
	I got my livelihood deleted without warning, as if I was some kind of sinner beyond redemption.
	Patreon unpersoned me, and despite having sent multiple emails to Jack Conte, for some reason, he will not speak to me.
	Instead of having a reasonable conversation about what is happening, I am being ignored.
	Don't you think you might owe me an explanation for why you are treating me and others like me in such a heavy-handed fashion, Jack?
	It does indeed look like this is being done as a way of persecuting a perceived ideological opponent.
	It does indeed look like the purge, as Vice magazine put it, is being done over ideological differences.
	Why should anyone feel safe on your platform when, while trying to do damage control, your trust and safety team just reinforces this message to everyone.
	The progressive corporations are in charge and you have no rights.
	Jack Conte knows that what Patreon have done to me is unjust.
	They know I couldn't have known I was being held to this standard because not only is it ridiculous, their terms of service don't even support it and their CEO has admitted to it.
	Instead of any kind of due process, I instead had my account shut down.
	I believe that this is an unacceptable way for any company to do business with their users and I think that this is a prime example of why we need a digital bill of rights.
	We're talking about removing a person's income.
	The authority to take away a human being's income is a sobering responsibility.
	It is not something to be done on a whim and as a creator myself, I've had videos taken down.
	I always want Patreon to put creators first.
	We commit to improving creator understanding of our guidelines through more transparency and education.
	We commit to better process for notifying creators of policy warnings and violations.
	And we commit to better communication with creators in question.
	Okay, so that's it everybody.
	I hope this video helps you understand like why we do what we do and add some transparency to the way we think about these sorts of tough problems.
	And I think it's good to end just by reiterating how seriously I take and Patreon takes content policy.
	I am personally a staunch advocate of free speech and our teams are meticulous in these investigations to make sure that we're being as unbiased and as fair as possible.

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