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Dec. 22, 2018 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
08:52
The Trust and Safety Junta (#PatreonPurge 5)
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So basically one of the bans was of Sargon of Akkad.
He's defending me from the Wall Street Journal's scrutiny and basically his Patreon was banned.
It's been three weeks to the day since Patreon removed my crowdfunding page from their website and the losses are beginning to mount up as more and more people close their accounts.
In previous videos we saw how Patreon's trust and safety team decided to remove my account because of a paste bin document that was created by nihilistic trolls.
From what I can tell, he called Nazis the N-word.
Instead of addressing people's reasonable concerns in a public and transparent manner, Patreon CEO Jack Conte decided to stay publicly silent and talk in private with others.
YouTuber Matt Christiansen had arranged a 30-minute telephone call with Jacqueline Hart, the head of Patreon's trust and safety committee, and afterwards he announced that while he had been asked to keep the details private, he was even less confident in the platform following their conversation, describing Patreon as explicitly not pro-free speech, not pro-free market, and their terms of service enforcement is subjective by design.
This is congruent with Patreon's behaviour thus far.
The crux of the backlash against the company is that they are actually enforcing rules that do not exist on their terms of service.
Patreon has deplatformed me because of my brand, which was just fine for Patreon to work with for the four years prior to Jacqueline Hart joining Patreon's Trust and Service team three months previously in October 2018.
As Jack Conte's conversation with Tim Poole revealed, he knows that the Trust and Safety Committee is not following the rules as written and appears to be making this up as they go along.
This became all the more evident as Patreon rang yet another content creator, a YouTuber who runs a channel called Nuance Bro.
And when discussing the circumstances of my deplatforming with him, after claiming that they don't comment on individual cases, of course, Maria from Patreon's Trust and Safety Committee had said, quote, well it wasn't just this one incident and apparently alluded to an incident in 2017.
Nuance Bro followed up this with a request for more information on the incident in question and Maria said that she would email the information across.
This is the email that he received and it contained two bits of information that apparently serve as further justification of my deplatforming.
The first is bizarre as they link a video which I think is best described as pointless YouTube drama in which I read out audience comments about another YouTuber.
I don't believe there's anything that can be considered hate speech in there but I suppose given the fluid nature of the definition of hate speech who knows.
But it was the second link that was absolutely fascinating.
In June 2017 I along with many other YouTube creators traveled to Los Angeles to attend that year's VidCon event.
VidCon bills itself as a community festival, creator conference and industry summit all wrapped up into one.
We'd gone there to have a good time and meet one another.
At VidCon there were public panels most of which had not been announced when we purchased our tickets and we attended one with a polite woman called Anita Sarkeesian, a feminist video game critic.
She noticed me, and this happened.
If you Google my name on YouTube, you get shitheads like this dude who are making these dumbass videos that just say garbage human.
Whatever, dude.
I had been sitting politely in the front row, and as you can imagine, abusing the audience from the stage is a violation of VidCon's rules.
So I filed a complaint to VidCon.
Anita Sarkeesian decided to write an attack piece on her website Feminist Frequency and dog whistle to Patreon to shut my Patreon account down.
Quote, he makes over $5,000 a month on Patreon for creating YouTube videos that mock, insult and discredit myself and other whammen online.
VidCon ignored me, and Patreon responded by performing an investigation.
The link that Maria from Patreon's Trust and Safety Committee sent to NuanceBro contained Mike.com's coverage of the incident.
Molly Starr, head of communication at Patreon, told Mike.com that Patreon was looking into it because of the viral nature of Anita Sarkeesian abusing the audience from a VidCon stage.
She later intimidated another YouTuber as well, who runs the channel Boogie2988 after he had a disagreement with her after another panel.
Within two hours, Patreon sent Mike.com an update on the situation.
Quote, we do not consider attendance at a public event to violate our policies.
They presumably felt some pressure, however, as they then proceeded to disavow my, quote, distasteful behaviour and content, but then said it didn't violate their policies.
Well, I agree.
I mean, it is distasteful to attend an Anita Sarkeesian panel, but sometimes one must, for the cause of driving the conversation forward, into realms we hitherto have lacked the moral fortitude to tread.
Patreon noted that, quote, he has not posted content to his account since November 2016.
In addition, we have received very few complaints about this page.
So let's be clear.
In June 2017, Patreon said that I did nothing wrong at VidCon 2017.
Patreon was specific that they checked that content of mine that was on Patreon.
Patreon are on record to the entire world as saying, Sargon is a good boy.
But do you know who wasn't a good boy?
Hank Green, co-founder of VidCon, who had to apologize to Anita Sarkeesian for allowing the wretched plebeians to attend a community gathering and force her to abuse us from the stage.
This was a demonstrable use of their terms of service.
Is the content on Patreon?
No.
If not, is there any manifest observable behaviour?
No, because we, Patreon, do not consider attendance at a public event to violate our policies.
This complaint is not justified.
And for some reason, Maria of the Trust and Safety Committee sent Patreon's exoneration of me as further proof of my wrongdoing.
What is the message meant to be here?
Don't get abused at a convention, or else Patreon will ban you and side with your abusers.
Sitting politely is a form of manifest observable behavior.
If Patreon finds you did nothing wrong, you are in trouble.
This is lunacy.
There is clearly a sanitization of Patreon as a platform going on, taking place by a group of activists that appear to have taken over the trust and safety team, and Jacqueline Hart's doubling down on my deplatforming was as precisely as tone deaf and regressive as one might have expected to hear from a far left activist.
It's not just that she's making up the rules as she's going along, it's that these rules are the opposite of rules that were in force about a year ago.
And at no point have the rules been updated or anyone notified that these changes have been taking place.
And now they're being enforced as far as we can tell, arbitrarily.
Just because they don't happen to like my brand.
It's not that I think that Jack Conte agrees with this.
I know he doesn't.
He said as much in his leaked conversation with Tim Poole.
And in his interview with Dave Rubin, in which he seems nervous and pleading with us that he does agree with the moral points advanced against him and that we have nothing to fear.
Much like with Jack Dorsey and Twitter's previous commitment to free speech being flushed down the toilet, I don't think he thinks this is a good thing.
I think he is powerless to stop it.
The trust and safety team have told me that they don't like my brand.
And to change their mind, I must prove that I am not a racist.
If they truly are watching my entire online presence, then they are aware of the fact that I'm an individualist.
They know that I oppose racism.
The fact that I was arguing with racists is not enough.
The fact that I was in that position because of previously challenging racists is not enough.
Because nothing is enough.
Because they don't like my brand.
And to change their mind, I have to do the impossible and prove a negative.
Well, Patreon, I don't know what to tell you.
It doesn't seem like you're acting in good faith.
That wasn't a problem before Jacqueline Hart took over.
So you tell me what's changed.
I find this very disappointing because Patreon was supposed to be this alternative way for creators to earn revenue without getting censored.
Sure, advertisers might not like what you're doing.
That's understandable in a sense.
But now, even fan-funded, crowd-funded missions could get censored.
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